Introduction 3

atop one another in refrigerator-size racks, stringing them together with patented software and wiring. No enterprise has more computing power than Google with its network of garden-variety PCs on steroids.

They run the largest computer system in the world, Hennessy said. I don't think there is even anything close.In an age of specialization of labor, Google secretly assembles each and every PC in its massive network inside secure facilities that are strictly off limits to outsiders, including visitors to the Googleplex who think they have seen it all. Google is able to do this affordably because the massive scale of its operation makes it cost-effective and of higher quality than buying custom PCs from someone else. Working together, these customized computers rapidly carry out searches by breaking the queries down into tiny parts. These parts are processed simultaneously by comparing them to copies of the Internet that have been indexed and organized in advance. With plenty of redundancy built into its network, Google is able to reliably fire up more and more computers daily, rapidly returning search results without a glitch and without human intervention even as some PCs bum out and are not replaced. Instead, other PCs take over. Remarkably, as Hennessy noted, there is no comparable computer network or database in the public or private sector anywhere in the world. They realized early on that if they did a good job with the hardware, that it could be a competitive strength for the company he said. The hardware would be the key factor in being able to do search efficiently. And they are replicating computers at such a large volume that it makes sense to do it themselves. It is why launching a search engine that is competitive with Google would require a much larger capital investment than people realize.Thanks to the inclusion of small, highly targeted text advertisements that searchers click on for information, Google the search engine became Google the money machine a few years ago. This was while Google was still private  and thus inscrutable to all but the innermost circle of early investors and employees. But once its.