3 ms·
When you say "server based searching" I assume you mean things like Google's web search. It's fast because they dedicate tens of thousands of machines to storin
by mrshoe 17y ago
When you say "server based searching" I assume you mean things like Google's web search. It's fast because they dedicate tens of thousands of machines to storing the index and executing the queries. They can do that because their millions of users are all searching the same data set (the web). Dropbox couldn't do that because each user would be searching a different data set (their own files).
The fact that it's run on a server machine and not on a desktop machine has little effect on performance, and it probably doesn't make sense for Dropbox to provide the resources for good search when your desktop should be able to do a fine job of it.
- glhaynes 17y ago"Dropbox couldn't do that because each user would be searching a different data set (their own files)." I don't really understand the claim here: they'd have fewer machines but also far fewer users and a much smaller (collection of) datasets.
- easp 17y agoHuh? So they have to store the inverted index for my files on disk, rather than in RAM and so it takes 1s to return a search result, rather than 0.2. With all the cold data they are storing, I imagine their servers have io ops to spare.