Comments on: The Incubation Platform

By: Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 05 May 2004 07:52:50 +0000

Using the Google Web API they already provide a “plugin” for others to use their search. Would be nice if they’d plugin the rest of their apps as well, though.

By: Doug Cutting

Doug Cutting — Wed, 05 May 2004 01:55:23 +0000

Sure, they could fit the “web in RAM”, but why would they? They clearly have enough RAM to hold compressed copies of the 5B pages HTML pages they index, if that qualifies as putting the “web in RAM”. But I’d guess they have better things to do with all that RAM. Search-related accesses to individual pages are at the rate of 10x query traffic, i.e, probably less than 100k/second. There’s no need to put that in RAM when you’ve got 100k disks.

By: Kendall Willets

Kendall Willets — Wed, 05 May 2004 01:37:29 +0000

This looks like hooey to me too. If they do 300M searches per day, and the average page is 10K, then they're doing one snippet per day for every

4,285,199,774 * 10 kilobytes /(300 million * 10)
= 14.3 kilobytes

That's a fairly sparse hit rate, and assuming a Zapfian distribution, most of the pages are probably hit less than once a month.

By: Milly

Milly — Wed, 05 May 2004 00:36:06 +0000

Again with this “web in RAM” thing! I guess it doesn’t take long to create an urban myth in Internet time :-

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+“web+in+ram”

I still think it’s hokum :-

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+“web+in+ram”+twaddle

Someone (convincingly) tell me I’m wrong, if I’m wrong, please.

Hmm, I wonder how long before this (metalink?) works too? :-

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+“web+in+ram”+hokum

Um, that wasn’t really your main point, I realise …