Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds

Google is normally quite secretive about their search infrastructure but, in a break from tradition, they have revealed that a single search query on Google can consume the processing power of 1000 machines.
Google Fellow Jeff Dean, in a keynote talk at WSDM 2009, shared some numbers about Google’s impressive growth run from 1999 to 2009. According to Dean, while both search queries and processing power have gone up by a factor of 1000, latency has gone down from around 1000ms to 200ms. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999.

Continue reading: http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/google-query-uses-1000-machines/7433/