[...] The biggest RAM database of all...
An overlooked feature that made Google really cool in the beginning was their snippets. This is the excerpt of text that shows a few sample sentences from each web page matching your search. Google's snippets show just the part of the web page that have your search terms in them; other search engines before always showed the same couple of sentences from the start of the web page, no matter what you had searched for.
Consider the insane cost to implement this simple feature. Google has to keep a copy of every web page on the Internet on their servers in order to show you the piece of the web page where your search terms hit. Everything is served from RAM, only booted from disk. And they have multiple separate search clusters at their co-locations. This means that Google is currently storing multiple copies of the entire web in RAM. My napkin is hard to read with all these zeroes on it, but that's a lot of memory. Talk about barrier to entry.
-- Sandip Bhattacharya sandip (at) puroga.com Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Work: http://www.puroga.com Home: http://www.sandipb.net
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