Google Moves From Search To Inventor 131
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Now to comment on something I read in the article: 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.
Re:That Link You Ordered, Sir (Score:3, Funny)
You just invented and RSS feed printer!
Don't forget to run to the patent office
Secretive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, so I thought. And indeed the article says, "Google is notoriously secretive about its technology", "Google will not comment on its costs". Yet Bill Gates is quoted as saying "Google doesn't have anything magic here. We spend a little bit more per machine. But to do the same tasks, we have less machines.".
A web search doesn't turn up the reference for that quote (and the article doesn't link to it), so it's hard to know the context. But stil
Re:Secretive? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Secretive? (Score:2)
Re:Secretive? (Score:2)
Because Google servers are custom made, we'll use pricing information for comparable PC-based server racks for illustration. For example, in late 2002 a rack of 88 dual-CPU 2-GHz Intel Xeon servers with 2 Gbytes of RAM and an 80-Gbyte hard disk was offered on RackSaver.com for around $278,000. This figure translates into a monthly capital cost of $7,700 per rack over three years.
The cost a
Re:Secretive? (Score:2)
Possibly all those "ex-Microsoft" employees, perhapps, maybe?
Re:That Link You Ordered, Sir (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft won't change their stance on Google.
I've said many times [that] Microsoft's strategy (so far) has been to keep Google labelled a search engine, and only a search engine, (albeit covertly) as long as possible to keep Google hemmed in and avoid letting people begin to see what's up Google's shirt sleeves. This has been a stall tactic. Microsoft has got to have a lot of gerbils running on the wheels to come up with ways to find the silver bullet to put right between Google's eyes. Do they think they'll find it? Probably. Will they? Probably not. Should they be scared? Yes.
I don't think it's worked, but it's the only tactic Microsoft knows. After all, their primary arsenal has always been Huey, Dewey and Louie (Marketing, Sales, and PR). When Microsoft runs out of arrows in its quiver, it'll become the one thing it has thought would never happen: become just another company, just as IBM became when Microsoft didn't renew their contract ('89? '90?)for a joint OS and it became Windows & OS/2. IBM just wasn't able to get the sell-through Microsoft got with Windows, and Microsoft was the new king of the mountain.
What's hurting Microsoft isn't they came late to the show (avoided during the most infamous "Summer of Bill" but they've had to grow from the desktop up to a global perspective, but that Google hasn't even worried about the desktop (so far). They got started at the global level and just focused upon information management, leaving a browser, essentially any browser, as the interface. I see it to be what happened to Encyclopædia Britannica when everything was electronic and they were left thinking about their next hardcopy print run, then trying to get an electronic format (and people buying CDs and DVDs) vs. something such as Wikipedia which started online.
I'm not saying every company or product which starts online will always be better, but the odds are against a hard world company|product being able to prevent or leapfrog a company which doesn't have to worry about a bridge from the past to the future and not lose sight of both balls in the air.
Another good example is BlockBuster and Netflix. Blockbuster's underlying algorithm (business model) was based upon late return fees. NetFlix comes along such that brick & mortar means nothing, reducing all of the financial obligations which go along with it, including a dependence upon those late fees. BlockBuster suddenly realized they were getting dusted in all but impulse rentals and had to do something. First, they tried to pull a fast one over everyones' eyes by declaring "no late fees" whilst slipping a hand into your wallet. When they got caught, they realized they'd better do something...and fast. So they picked the most successful video rental business model they could find on short notice: NetFlix. Just a price war.
Lots of other stories could be listed as well (e.g., Amazon vs. B&N, Border's, etc.)
Re:That Link You Ordered, Sir (Score:2)
Then a giant corporate farm that specialized in one crop would come in and buy it out, right?
Google chips? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just hope that, if they are developing chips in-house (and if they are, I expect them to be cheap and powerful), they are less tight-fisted than they are with their other technical innovations. A new power-player in the CPU market would be great for us end-users
Seriously though, if they start manufacturing all their own hardware from scratch, they're probably going to be more independent than any major computer-based international in recent history. *exaggeration ends*
Re:Google chips? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm... I'd kind of like to buy a RAID card that is accelerated for database and/or search work. I mean, issue high-level commands to the controller hardware, and let it collect the results while the main processor is doing something else. We're getting to the point where classical RDBMS systems are pretty well-understood, and the average RAID controller has a fair bit of hardware already. How far are we from having some relatively simple processor with an inflated L1 cache and high clock rate that does the heavy database work (including RAID/transaction logging) before it even reaches your machine?
It makes sense to do this, because database performance is big business -- just look at what some companies spend on licensing Oracle! As long as you're not worried about spatial queries, you could probably even get by without an FPU. There might be a lot of justification for this.
Re:Google chips? (Score:2)
Re:Google chips? (Score:2)
Of course there will be a lot of speculation about them making CPU's and are going to take on AMD and Intel. But the simplest explanation is that they are making hardware to improve their search performance.
Re:Google chips? (Score:2)
RAID card? irrelevant. Google's entire production database is in RAM. Disks are just for boot and persistence.
Re:Google chips? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the traditional model. TFA talks about Google needing to get away from some of their search-business habits for their new ventures, like online payment processing and the like. Redundant persistence, logging, failover protection, etc. is a huge issue any time your database works with information that represents some kind of monetary value. It could be manipulating auction bids, virtual property like Second Life or WoW, or actual money, but there are grave legal dangers if there is something in dis
Re:Google chips? (Score:2)
But most of the solid state stuff I see is geared as hard disc replacement - in the order of gigabytes, usually operating using slow IDE interfaces. Anyone know of something that plugs in (and interfaces through) a PCIX port?
Re:Google chips? (Score:1)
Re:Google chips? (Score:3, Interesting)
This was my degree supervisor's main research interest. Searching for 'Intelligent File Store' in conjunction with 'Essex' and 'Lavington' should find lots of juicy info.
See Netezza's "SPU"s (snipper processing units) (Score:2)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netezza [wikipedia.org]
I also believe that intelligent disk IO will be important in the future. No, it's important right now. Disks are a bottleneck and having dedicated hardware that can leverage spindle parallelism and free up the memory disk controller pat
Re:Google chips? (Score:5, Funny)
The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers.
lemme guess, the chips are gonna be called... "Beta"?
Re:Google chips? (Score:1)
Of course! What don't they call "Beta"?
Re:Google chips? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Google chips? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nope, total different name (Score:2)
Re:Google chips? (Score:1)
Re:Google chips? (Score:2)
Of course, they'd have the challenge of inven
Google Processor (Score:2)
My point, Google doesn't need raw performance, they need an architeture that scales well, supports lots of concurrent requests, and consumes very little power to make cluster mantaining costs less expensive. Well, thinking this way, at this point it looks like Google might buy Sun t
Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Much as I'd like to see the Alpha return, backed by Google (or pretty much anyone else. The death of PALCode was a sad day for the industry), it doesn't seem likely. The Alpha approach was to build the fastest chip possible; in terms of performance-per-watt or performance-per-dollar, it didn't do so well.
More likely, it's Google DRM (Score:2)
We already know they use a modified Linux kernel... what better than using proprietary hardware as well? That way, they are free from the cluctches of Intel, AMD, ATI, NVidia, HP, IBM etc., besides Microsoft, Oracle and the software gorillas.
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:1)
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:2)
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:2)
For Google, the sums are completely different. Every watt Google uses on a CPU costs them twice; once to turn it from electricity into heat (via computation) and another to extract and dissipate the hear. In California alone, the amount of power to be used by proposed data centres (i.e. those to be built this year) is over 10% of the power consumption of the entire state.
Any CPU owned
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:2)
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:2)
Unless the chip was so outrageously fast that they could run an x86 emulator in it without a performance loss, it would be dead in the home and office PC market.
Or Google wants
Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe. (Score:2)
PALcode a good thing? (Score:2)
Why? What advantage did it offer over doing the same functions in low-level OS software, for example?
Boycott Google ;-) (Score:5, Funny)
This new wave of innovation probably uses Linux (created by a European communist) [shelleytherepublican.com] with a sordid history [shelleytherepublican.com]. No doubt this is part of an insiduous plot to destroy the valuable patents of The Sco Group.
Their so-called "inventions" have already led to a huge upturn in hacking, eponymously named "Google Hacking" [informit.com]. All true patriots must support tougher sentences [shelleytherepublican.com] for such evil terrorists [shelleytherepublican.com].
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:1)
It seems too out of whack even for right wing nutters... the tragedy/frightening part is that you can't really tell if its a joke or not.
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:1)
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:2)
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:2)
Damn. Irratible Monday morning peeve alert. To say "the republican bloggers" suggests that you think all of them are saying that, or that that's your impression. That's like when you see news saying "scientists agree with Al Gore" (as if there were none that don't), etc. There have to be some qualifiers in a statement like that. "Some republican bloggers..." makes you sound like a better observer of what's really happening. Otherwise, it would also mak
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:2)
There will always be a minority in any group that disagrees with the group. There are scientists who don't believe in global warming, there are scientists that believe UFOs are aliens. The fact that there are dissenters isn't really relevant.
MOST republicans believe that the NYT reporters and NYT are "liberal" and should be punished for reporting facts. MOST republicans believe that they should be charg
Re:Boycott Google ;-) (Score:2)
I believe it's now customary to call those extreme people "chicken hawks" rather than lumping them all together with "republican".
Hopefully the more moderate people (who now refer to themselves as Democrat "or" Republican) in the "Middle" (where the American people actually stand) will strike out and start their own new "party" in the next decade. It's not impossible, they'll just have to come up with another color for the maps on TV and of
I for one... (Score:1, Funny)
When will the Terminator-1 chip have been designed ?
Owning the supply chain (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Owning the supply chain (Score:2)
Technology Incubator (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Technology Incubator (Score:3, Insightful)
Given Google's obvious love for thinking "outside the box" they have a higher chance of something sticking than with for example Yahoo.
Re:Technology Incubator (Score:2)
Re:Technology Incubator (Score:2)
"Our position is that search is a very hard problem. We have still a lot of work to do," said Douglas Merrill, who looks after internal engineering...Mr Merrill said 70% of the company's activities remained focused on search.
Re:Technology Incubator (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if you want to innovate, or research, you have to do that. VCs don't do that, they just hope that the pack of people they give money won't just waste that money but actually come up with an idea that sticks to that wall. In-house research is not comparable with what VCs do with startups which usually base their entire future on one idea and if that fails, they fail. In research every idea that you prove is a failure is in fact a success since it gives you valueable knowledge and experience which you can use in the next trials if you have the money for it, and well, they have the money.
Re:Technology Incubator (Score:2)
Re:Technology Incubator (Score:1)
well duh (Score:2)
BBC says: Google to remain focused on search (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BBC says: Google to remain focused on search (Score:1)
Re:BBC says: Google to remain focused on search (Score:2)
This kind of thing that keeps us loving google (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This kind of thing that keeps us loving google (Score:1, Insightful)
No-one runs a company to provide free meals. That is what the tax slurping, revenue leaking government of the US of A is for
Re:This kind of thing that keeps us loving google (Score:2)
Generally, those companies that produce what the market wants do OK in terms of profits also. Google is certainly no exception.
I think their challenge will be to stay true to their beliefs if they have a few disappointing quarters. The way they are going right now, they have a real shot at meeting their founders' extravagent ambition of changing the world.
Re:This kind of thing that keeps us loving google (Score:2)
I guess the main reason this hasn't been modded "-1, Shill" is that there hasn't so far been a tradition of people shilling for Google.
Re:This kind of thing that keeps us loving google (Score:1)
Is it, indeed, aparent? I didn't think it was very clear at all.
Re:This kind of thing that keeps us loving google (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey I like Google and I do think it is a good company but please throw in a few facts along with the extreme cheering.
1. They make a ton of money. I.E. profits from advertising. I will admit that it is some of the least offensive advertising in the planet but they are ads none the less.
2. Their search engine is closed source. Yep you got it baby cakes every bit as closed source as Microsoft Office and Windows.
3. China.
As I said, I like Google. I would work for them if they offered me a job. They are not perfect and frankly we are not their customers! We are no more their customers than wheat is a farmers customers. They harvest us and sell us to their advertisers. The people that buy Google ads are Google's customers.
We are Google's product.
What's bad about Google being a broker? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, you agree that Google is a good company, but now you are going to tell us some ways in which Google is bad, so that overall Google is not as good as we may think. I'm listening.
So, they profit a lot from ads. I was
Re:What's bad about Google being a broker? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think they are distributing it.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/ [google.com]
I don't think that closed source is a bad thing. Some do but I really don't. I just also
Big plans - big resources (Score:1)
Re:Big plans - big resources (Score:2)
It's more accurate to say that they're not afraid to buy large-scale projects [cooltechzone.com].
Investing that pile of cash (Score:5, Insightful)
They also probably reduce thebrain-drain of their talented employees - since working on Google must be very, very rewarding for someone with an imaginative mind but not a lot of organizational know-how.
Re:Investing that pile of cash (Score:1)
Re:Investing that pile of cash (Score:2)
Other companies just put it in the employment agreement, but Google makes people feel good about signing over their soul.
Brilliant. Now THAT is innovation.
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You're forgetting one Manufacturer (Score:4, Interesting)
No... (Score:2)
And they in turn outsource the production of their computing resources to other vendors (Cray, Sun, Supermicro, etc.)
I think it's a bit of wising up on their part. Why should they be so suspicious of what are now anonymous, commodity products? Just get it while the getting's good, you know? Better to stay simple and low profile than high profile and complicated that just screams "Government Purhcase! Government Purchase!"
Fourth largest? (Score:2)
IBM had server sales of more than five billion dollars [itjungle.com] last year (or three billion, if you don't count mainframes). Even lowly Sun beats out Dell [com.com], which comes in at almost $1B.
Keep in mind that this is just for one year. Pick your favorite guess for how large Googles server farm is and divide by the average age of those machines. Do you still think they're assembling more than a billion dollars of hardware per year?
Re:Fourth largest? (Score:1)
Can Google invent AI? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google certainly has the data to whet the appetite of an AI Mind [blogcharm.com], but first Google would need an AI Engine such as Mind.Forth [sourceforge.net] to impose order on the data, so that Google would not just store the data but would know the web of data.
Maybe Google will trigger a Technological Singularity [blogcharm.com].
The chip business.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The chip business.. (Score:1)
Re:The chip business.. (Score:2)
* the power is directly proportional to the number of simultaneous particles being processed.
So really all of existance could be processed in a single instant with sufficient mater to energy
Re:The chip business.. (Score:1)
Next from Googlle... (Score:1)
Google is the best tech, not search, company (Score:1)
Re:Google is the best tech, not search, company (Score:1)
An idea I've suggested (Score:2)
On several occasions I've suggested to customers that they consider building their own servers. Going by the look on their face you'd think I'd just asked directions to Mars. I'll usually let them ba-humbug the idea for a while before informing them that Google does it and always has. That usually gets them started asking questions instead of telling me why it's such a bad idea.
That wouldn't work for most companies, but if they've got a technolo
Re:An idea I've suggested (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:An idea I've suggested (Score:1)
Now if you have 30 identical servers, it is probably a good idea to build your own. That way, even if you have to spend 20 hours one week diagnosing a hardware problem, you can apply it to all 30 machines. A lot more efficient than the work that would go into one or two machines.
Driad? (Score:2)
WTF is "Driad", Gates claims it's Microsoft's answer to MapReduce?
Also, sadly the article does not mention that Google runs almost entirely on Linux. There's room for a couple of Bill Gates quotes on how Microsoft's solutions are better, but no mention of the fact that Google has no need for any of them.
Thin Clients (Score:1, Insightful)
Internet based word processing and spreadsheets, email on the internet, a google service for everything else... It wouldn't surprise me if the next generation of personal computers are nothing more than a SunRay type thin client plugged into the internet, Sun helps with the hardware and google services will do the rest... it seems to be the vision of both companies...
Re:Thin Clients (Score:1)
Better Sun instead of Microsoft ... (Score:2)
Increase Your Numbers
Increase those spreadsheet numbers now,
get an outcome with up to 500 units more!
www.wearethespreadsheetsniffers.com
I predicted (Score:1)
Vertical integration (Score:1)
Re:Vertical integration (Score:2)
GPU = Google Processing Unit (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe one day we have a GPU (Google Processing Uni) inside our PCs that has special hardware support for indexing, retrieval and text processing in general. Independently of Google or any particular vendor, the theoretical question that intrigues me is: what operations would you like to have built in to aid the search business?
PageRank in microcode? Porter stemmer as an assembler instruction?
For several decades, CPU design has been driven mostly by traditional numerical concerns. While ranking algorithms certainly are based on numerical principles as well, it remains to be investigated whether there are operations that are worth providing at hardware level, or (more likely) completely new architectures.
Note that their MapReduce paradigm of parallel data processing is close to data flow machines in some sense, and while these were not a success at the time, times have changed (it's always a question of boundary conditions).
Make it an add-on card... (Score:2)
A few PowerPC processors, and some FPGAs. Shouldn't cost much more than a typical hardware RAID SATA controller.
It could run a virtual FS in microcode on partitions on the disk (in addition to giving you standard RAID access to the deices). You use a slightly abstracted API to talk to it. Just throw your files into it, and it versions them, extracts text strings, etc. all on its' own. Then you can do fast search and retrieval of said content.
Man that would be cool. G
Re:Google OS (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Google OS (Score:3, Insightful)
If I could pop Ubuntu onto my workstations and leverage my existing five-figure investment in MS-only software (hey, I'm only a three person shop), I'd seriously consider taking the plunge. WGA scares the shit out of me, and I'm fully legal from top to bottom. Two to three days of downtime on just one of my machines at the wrong time could cost me my paycheck for the month, and a lost client or two. I bristle at the possibility tha
Re:Google OS (Score:1)