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Searching and how Google works

Saw an interesting post on how google works on weblogs.asp.net (I can't find that post so apologies to its author) and after a google search :) came across this. I can understand that google is a powerful piece of technology and works very well in the way its intended to (free text searching over masses after masses of text data), the fact that its true distributed computing also holds me in awe. The trouble is how can it be applied to other search types, for example a website search that uses a database to control its searching (using say a SP to look at table, virtual table or view - or mixture). Not amazingly accurate, sometimes slow ( for example if the search is so open the data coming back is large in size), it often does it the job but its no where near the google technology for performance (granted the google suff is very targeted in its operation). I am left wondering if the two could be merged how database data could be sloted into a distributed high performance system like the google one, if anyone has any comments, thoughts or knows of any research in this area then let me know.

Update: using Jesse's archive system I found the previous post on how google works.

Comments

Andrew Stopford said:

It was'nt that one Frans but thanks for the link all the same, interesting to see natural language in search engines
# February 8, 2004 11:07 AM

Kartal Guner said:

I;m not sure about which post you were referring to, but I found these very informative. I hope they help.
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
http://www.computer.org/micro/mi2003/m2022.pdf
# February 8, 2004 1:13 PM

Kartal Guner said:

Just actually looked at the link you were referring to, so you got the first one :)
# February 8, 2004 1:19 PM

Cameron Reilly said:

# February 8, 2004 4:20 PM

Dumky said:

Google has a pretty interesting architecture, to achieve its target performance (under .5 second per request). I posted some more info and pointers, a couple of months back, at: http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000044.html
# February 9, 2004 8:35 PM