Google Is Big: Another Breathless Description
March 6, 2013
I read with some fatigue “Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon.” The main idea is that Twitter like Google has some metasoftware which allows wonderfully efficient processing to happen in a really wonderful way. Here’s the snippet which I noted:
These systems span a worldwide network of data centers, responding to billions of online requests with each passing second, and when Wilkes first saw them in action, he felt like Neo as he downs the red pill, leaves the virtual reality of the Matrix, and suddenly lays eyes on the vast network of machinery that actually runs the thing. He was gobsmacked at the size of it all — and this was a man who had spent more than 25 years as a researcher at HP Labs, working to push the boundaries of modern computing. “I’m an old guy. Megabytes were big things,” Wilkes says, in describing the experience. “But when I came to Google, I had to add another three zeros to all my numbers.” Google is a place, he explains, where someone might receive an emergency alert because a system that stores data is down to its last few petabytes of space. In other words, billions of megabytes can flood a fleet of Google machines in a matter of hours.
Yep, a motion picture analogy. Forget old school science fiction. The Googles and Twitters are like the movies.
Yesterday in the discussion which followed my Cebit talk, one of the people in the audience asked, “Isn’t Google too big?”
The question underscores the real concern of some folks. Google defines search and quite a few other online experiences. In Europe, Google is the big dog referrer in some countries. Russia seems to be up for grabs. But in Denmark, France, Germany, and Spain, Google reigns supreme.
Behind the question is a sense at least in the mind of one person at my lecture, that Google is a little too big.
My comment to the questioner was, “Isn’t it a little late to be worrying about Google. Where were you in 1998?”
The audience fell silent, presumably reflecting on the fact that Google has shifted search and retrieval from old fashioned metrics of precision and recall to “good enough” from statistical and advertising methods of determining what one gets from a query.
One of the folks at the session was deep into a study of what “good enough” means. Why not ask Google and replicate a breathless list of astounding technical achievements. That works for Wired. Won’t the method work for those who want to understand the brave old worlds of Google, Twitter, and other modern information systems?
Excellence is good enough when it produces big revenues, convenience, and the doubt about where to go for information. Maybe that’s why Google is headed toward $1,000 a share and “regular” search vendors are struggling to stay afloat? Autonomy’s value heads south. Google surges upwards. I think there is a message there.
Stephen E Arnold, March 6, 2013
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