3 ms·

Am I the only person here who wasn’t thinking about the frontend, but rather all the things that need to happen in the backend to render the search results? To

Am I the only person here who wasn’t thinking about the frontend, but rather all the things that need to happen in the backend to render the search results? To me it feels like an oversight when answering the question “how the hell is Google so fast?” and not digging into how Google is able to return the results to your actual search query in a matter of milliseconds. That, to me, is the real miracle.

tyingq 6y ago
It is handy, though, that search results are free to be very "eventually consistent" and easily distributed. Not discounting the other magic, but exposing read-only data, close to the end user, where freshness isn't a huge concern does simplify things.
ma2rten 6y ago
There is a lecture from Jeff Dean about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.
kempbellt 6y ago
I find this to be the more fascinating part of Google's response time as well. Sending an optimized html file to a client in a matter of milliseconds is cool, but static pages should all load very quickly, so I don't see much surprise here - they've just optimized their front-end and done a good job of it. Them being able to take your query, discover the data that answers your query, then optimize that data down to a little html snippet that fast is significantly more impressive to me.
- sozy777 6y ago
  And setup ads biddings, customized to you...
mhh__ 6y ago
It is an oversight, but equally for people like me it is helpful - I know how to optimise C++ (maybe not at google scale on my own!) but I've bullied compilers and measured pmc's, I haven't got a clue how to optimise frontends (beyond my usual solution of give up go and do something pleasurable)
brundolf 6y ago
Sure, but that's a) impossible to dig into from the outside and b) less likely to yield useful information for the average developer who's trying to speed up a website.
GretchenKlein91 6y ago
yeah me too
GuB-42 6y ago
Something interesting I noticed is that the further you go down the pages, the slower it gets. By their own metric, page 10+ take several times longer to arrive, and most search terms only have a few hundred results at best, even when showing billions of results, you only see the real number when you hit the last page. For example, for me, the word "the" only has 445 actual results (instead of 25 billions), and page 45 takes 2 seconds to complete, compared to 0.7 seconds for page 1.

tyingq 6y ago

It is handy, though, that search results are free to be very "eventually consistent" and easily distributed. Not discounting the other magic, but exposing read-only data, close to the end user, where freshness isn't a huge concern does simplify things.

ma2rten 6y ago

There is a lecture from Jeff Dean about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.

kempbellt 6y ago

I find this to be the more fascinating part of Google's response time as well. Sending an optimized html file to a client in a matter of milliseconds is cool, but static pages should all load very quickly, so I don't see much surprise here - they've just optimized their front-end and done a good job of it. Them being able to take your query, discover the data that answers your query, then optimize that data down to a little html snippet that fast is significantly more impressive to me.

sozy777 6y ago
And setup ads biddings, customized to you...

mhh__ 6y ago

It is an oversight, but equally for people like me it is helpful - I know how to optimise C++ (maybe not at google scale on my own!) but I've bullied compilers and measured pmc's, I haven't got a clue how to optimise frontends (beyond my usual solution of give up go and do something pleasurable)

brundolf 6y ago

Sure, but that's a) impossible to dig into from the outside and b) less likely to yield useful information for the average developer who's trying to speed up a website.

GretchenKlein91 6y ago

yeah me too

GuB-42 6y ago

Something interesting I noticed is that the further you go down the pages, the slower it gets. By their own metric, page 10+ take several times longer to arrive, and most search terms only have a few hundred results at best, even when showing billions of results, you only see the real number when you hit the last page. For example, for me, the word "the" only has 445 actual results (instead of 25 billions), and page 45 takes 2 seconds to complete, compared to 0.7 seconds for page 1.