photo: Coding Horror

So first, this is how google works. Google has things called “crawlers” that roam around the internet saving every single webpage on their “index”. When you do a search, you are actually searching through google’s index not the actual internet.

When google changed over from storing the index in I guess hard drive space to storing it in memory or RAM, the machine usage went from 12 to 1000 machines.

So when you do a search, you are searching the memory of those 1000 machines. Your search query may not use up all 1000 of those machines but it might. And it happens all under .2 seconds.

I think that’s pretty amazing if you think about how big the internet is. How much memory would it take to store index all the pages? How much processing power does it take to do even one search through all those pages?

Here’s another little fun fact: It takes 0.0003 kWh of energy (1.08 kJ for you Chem people) for each search you make. That’s about the same amount of energy your body burns in 10 seconds.