Peeking Into Google
InternetNews has an article which gives an insight into Google from Urs Hoelzle, Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering who was at eclipseCON 2005.
Quote:
As a search query comes into the system, it hits a Web server, then is split into chunks of service. One set of index servers contains the index; one set of machines contains one full index. To actually answer a query, Google has to use one complete set of servers. Since that set is replicated as a fail-safe, it also increases throughput, because if one set is busy, a new query can be routed to the next set, which drives down search time per box.
- Y! MyWeb
Google's secret of success? Dealing with failure.
News.com are also covering Urs Hoelzle's appearance as their top story today. This links to the story.