Google Search - Then & Now

Speaking at WSDM 2009, Google Fellow Jeff Dean in a keynote talk shared how Google has grown from 1999 to 2009. Various search engine enthusiasts have blogged about the facts presented in the talk from their own notes.

Excerpts:

Google handles 1000 times more queries now with 1000 times more processing power (# machines * speed of the machines).
It uses 1000 machines to handle a single query compared to just 12 previously.
Query latency has improved from under 1000ms to normally under 200ms now.
Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999.
For many pages, search results now change within minutes of the page changing.
Rolled out seven major rearchitecture efforts in ten years.
In-house design from the ground up: rack design, pc class motherboards, linux, and in-house software (GFS, BigTable, etc...)
Google's machine translation models use a million lookups in a multi-terabyte model just to translate one sentence.

Popularity comes at a price. Google is now accused of harming the environment with it's energy consumption (a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2) and for not practicing what it preaches.

Also see: How LARGE websites manage performance & scalability