You have bought a Durian. You found it in a supermarket, you never saw this fruit before. It’s imported from Thailand. How to eat it? You have no idea and you don’t know anyone who could tell you that. No problem, just Google it! Yes, search on Google ‘how to eat durian’ and there you are – you have all the information on your desktop, laptop, or smartphone screen with images, videos, and all that.
That’s a fictional example but today we actually look for answers to varieties of questions that arise in our everyday life on Google. A student searching for a book, a researcher exploring journal articles, a tourist trying to locate a hotel, a housewife seeking a recipe – all are on Google. The proper noun Google has become a verb and ‘Google it’ is now a phrase in the English language.
But where does google find all this information? Of course, Google does not create them. Actually, the source of Google’s findings is the world wide web – all the websites, web pages, and videos on the internet. Google is a search engine. It searches through the world wide web for the material available relating to our query and presents them to us. Well, it doesn’t seem to be a very difficult thing to do. But wait, where does the world wide web exist? The answer is, on numerous computers, servers, data centers, etc. located all over the world and connected through the internet. There are billions of web pages on the world wide web and millions of new ones are getting added every minute. People throughout the world are constantly uploading photos, videos, reviews, advertisements, news, articles, research papers, books, etc. on the web. So, it’s not a simple thing to search through these billions of sources for the particular information that you have googled for and bring it to you in seconds. To do this, Google indexes all types of information, as Google explains, ‘from text and images in web pages to real-world information, like whether a local store has a sweater you’re looking for in stock.’ That sounds even more difficult thing to do.
In an article titled ‘Web Search for A Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture’ published by the IEEE Computer Society, Google Fellow Luiz André Barroso described how Google executes web searches by the users. The author mentioned that to answer a single query Google has to read hundreds of megabytes of data and spend tens of billions of CPU cycles. To support a peak request of hundreds of thousands of queries per second Google requires a huge IT infrastructure with the power of the largest supercomputers.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on February 8, 2023. Please read the full article here or here.