How Many Googlebots Does it Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

After the recent Barcelona Search Congress in January, anyone would think that Barcelona is becoming the hub of all things Search!

Yesterday saw the start of WSDM 2009 - apparently we're supposed to read it "wisdom" guys - which is only the second, but hugely important ACM (Association for Computer Machinery) International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. OK, sorry for all those acronyms, there

Although very small scale as opposed tothe search congress, and held in the Auditorium of the Imagina Building, there were some fascinating things discussed on just day one.

Google's Jeff Dean kicked off the show (ok, well after the typical Spanish coffees, etc.) and literally wow-ed the audience with details of Google's infrastructure with regards search compared to 1999 and 2009.

Google now has 1000 times more search queries now than in 1999, so they also now have 1000 more computers, processors, etc. to tackle the problem. This has resulted in speedier repsonses (down to 200 miliseconds from 1000) and it's amazing to think that up to 1000 machines are consulted for a single search string!Perhaps the most important and impressive thing to note was that the new machines also crawl content much much faster (like 10,000 times faster) meaning that often SERPs change order within minutes of being shown - your position is never absolute until another full day or update, which is amazing.

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