Google Moves From Search To Inventor

TubHarsh writes "The New York Times reports that Google continues to expand its scope from search engine to inventor. Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'. The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers."

That Link You Ordered, Sir

[eldavojohn]

I don't like being a karma whore but here's a working link to the NYTimes article [nytimes.com]. And, if you're like me and hate ads, try out the text only version [nytimes.com]. That's right, in order to get to read an article without obstruction, you have to pretend to be both an RSS feed AND a printing machine.

Now to comment on something I read in the article:

"At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both."

I disagree with that. I think it should be re-stated to say "It is very difficult to accomplish more than you have the resources to sustain." It's fatal in thinking that you only do one thing for a business to be successful. A simple analogy would be the farms that I grew up on. No one specialized in one crop or animal. Why? Because sometimes the market would tank for one particular thing and it would tank hard. If you had a distributed investment in produce (like a portfolio) then you would survive most of the market problems. I think Google's strategy is much the same in that they are trying to cement themselves in other technologies--not because they're going to lose the search market--just because it's a smart thing to do.

I think that there's a lot to be said about concentrating on one thing and getting it right. If you do get it right, then it's encouraged to move on to something else. I think Google has found themselves in the top of the search engine market. They found out that their technology doesn't work so well for closed domains (military or business level searching) so I think they just need to keep looking for new ways to stay ahead of the competition. Meanwhile, they have seemingly unlimited resources. Why not try to build your own router?

I mean, fresh graduates are cheap. Some fresh graduates have a lot of ideas and are decent workers while the majority of others are lemons that don't do anything. Why not hire a bunch of them and spend a lot of money weeding them out? I think it's great that Google's taking a stab at other technologies and I honestly think they have a good strategy for doing it.

To comment further on the article, Google makes unreliable machines reliable en masse via redundancy. They are indeed very secretive about their technology but if you want to learn more about their page ranking algorithms or basic technologies, why not read their patents? They always seem to be covered on Slashdot anyway.

BBC says: Google to remain focused on search

[joab_son_of_zeruiah]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5140066.stm [bbc.co.uk] go figure

Re:Boycott Google ;-)

[gowen]

You might wish to develop a sense of humour and/or the ability to detect satire. Of course, the fact that shelleytherepublican can be mistaken for a real conservative blogger does cast an rather sad reflection on the state of political discourse in America.

Re:Secretive?

[danskal]

I think that the article means "software technology". Google has in the past been quite open about the hardware it uses. I remember a quote (though I am not enough of a karma whore to dredge it up), where one of the google guys said that if they ran out of server horsepower, they just wandered down to the nearest Kwik-e Mart (TM) and picked up a bunch of new PCs. Most big companies would think to themselves: "We are really big so we must need really big servers", without actually doing the maths of what they really need. So most if not all big sites use much bigger servers (at least in terms of price, if not cpu power, memory, HDD space) than Google. Google's secret is its clustering algorithm, which enables it to spread the load over very many small servers, and still get a lightning fast response back to the user.