I work on Google Search infrastructure. Of course, caching is important, but a large percentage of queries don't hit the cache. The backend that serves results

I work on Google Search infrastructure. Of course, caching is important, but a large percentage of queries don't hit the cache. The backend that serves results that aren't cached has very strict latency bounds. > From that perspective, fast search results aren't actually that exciting since you can constantly run a background task to update the cached results and just serve those as the requests come in. If that's how it worked, I agree, it wouldn't be that impressive (every search result would just be a 1-1 cache lookup). That's not how it works, though, and as someone who works adjacent to the system, it is pretty impressive how fast it is when the work it's doing is actually pretty expensive.