How Search Works • Hacker News Board

Re: How Search Works

#21

Post by Stealth- » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 7:50 PM UTC

hurstdog wrote: post #7

prezjordan wrote: post #5

They left out the part where they index your emails and choose items you agree with over items you don't :)

I think you're joking, but just for those that don't think that, we don't actually do that.

There definitely is a form of a search bubble though, right?

Re: How Search Works

#22

Post by darxius » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 7:54 PM UTC

johnmurch wrote: post #4

Is this just PR for Google? Would rather see a more technical approach - although great for forwarding to clients when asked :)

It may just be PR, but I do think a lot of non-technical people can benefit from going through the animation. It's pretty amazing that that is what's happening. It could just be an attempt by Google to expose their craft to the technical layperson.

Re: How Search Works

#23

Post by DigitalJack » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 7:55 PM UTC

aiiane wrote: post #14

cryowaffle wrote: post #9

Whoa... really, 100 MILLION gigabytes to store "The Index"? Wow. That's big.

aka 95+ petabytes.

I prefer 100 MegaGigaBytes, son.

Re: How Search Works

#24

Post by alok-g » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:04 PM UTC

manojlds wrote: post #18

> By the way, in the 47 seconds you've been on this page, approximately 1,813,260 searches were performed. Aren't these just some random numbers that they pull out of the air?

That would be about 38K searches per second. Does this include Google instant searches?

Google search results show a time value for each search. E.g.: About 2,210,000,000 results (0.12 seconds). Is this time machine time per search? This number is often around 30 ms, give or take a factor of two. If so, each machine can handle about 30 searches per second. If so, 38K searches per second need about 1000 machines. Sounds a bit too low... so my interpretation must be wrong at least somewhere.

Re: How Search Works

#25

Post by alan_cx » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:05 PM UTC

hurstdog wrote: post #7

prezjordan wrote: post #5

They left out the part where they index your emails and choose items you agree with over items you don't :)

I think you're joking, but just for those that don't think that, we don't actually do that.

Where is the stuff about the creepy invasion and abuse of our privacy?

I know, I know, you don't do that. Nope, no one does. Everything is fine and dandy. Smile every one, no problem here.

Re: How Search Works

#26

Post by franze » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:06 PM UTC

thx matt and the google search team for doing this. it's nothing new for technically inclined people, but every little bit helps. helps for what? teaching people to worry about the right aspects of search and the impact on their business, instead of worrying about bullshitphrases that were planted in their head by a SEO agency key account or a blogpost from 2008. so well yes, thx for doing this. i will send it to my clients (and tell them to click on the bubbles, even though they don't look clickable)

now an anecdote (because i feel like telling one): this week started for me with an interview that finally got published http://werbeplanung.at/news/marketing/2013/02/interview-mit-... (it's german) in that interview i claimed that

* 80% of everything written about SEO and Google is bullshit

* that all the rumors, tipps and trends are actually hurting business

* that we should treat SEO as a numbers based craft of constant optimizations

* instead of the esoteric bullshit art it is currently

* and, if search traffic is important for the success of a business, they must rid themselves of external (agency) dependencies and develop internal structures

nothing to far fetched i think. everybody knows the SEO vertical is full of bullshit, i just took some time to estimate a number (based on a random sample of collected blogposts (that at least one person tweeted about))

yeah, i got a lot of angry emails, skype messages, linkedin messages, xing messages after the interview was published.

most of them mentioned at least one of these words

  * pagerank
  * whitehat
  * blackhat
  * grayhat
  * linkjuice
  * panda
  * pinguin ...

so yeah, thx google for educating people about search. keep up the good work.

Re: How Search Works

#27

Post by OGinparadise » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:09 PM UTC

"We write programs & formulas to deliver the best results possible"

There's a slight oversight, it should be: "We write programs & formulas to deliver the most profitable results possible for this quarter"

Re: How Search Works

#28

Post by mcintyre1994 » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:10 PM UTC

manojlds wrote: post #18

> By the way, in the 47 seconds you've been on this page, approximately 1,813,260 searches were performed. Aren't these just some random numbers that they pull out of the air?

It probably just increments by some fixed amount each second, but it seems like a statistic they would have an estimate of.

Re: How Search Works

#29

Post by moultano » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:14 PM UTC

OGinparadise wrote: post #27

"We write programs & formulas to deliver the best results possible" There's a slight oversight, it should be: "We write programs & formulas to deliver the most profitable results possible for this quarter"

This is completely false. The effect on revenue is not used to make launch decisions for ranking changes.

Re: How Search Works

#30

Post by kisstheblade » Fri, Mar 01, 2013, 8:15 PM UTC

Where could one find more technical information? Eg. how on earth they search through a 100Pb index and deliver me answers in 0,3 seconds... Do they actually search through the whole index (eg. using some kick-ass sharding or something like that to spread the search over 100000 servers or something...), or "cheat" in some way?