Here’s the diagram Google put out in their actual official blog explaining how Caffeine works:
My research chemist husband says that apparently Google is now a boron atom.
Seriously, in this case, the picture isn’t worth 1,000 words, but it may take 1,000 words to explain it.
At least Google included a series of fun facts to help me understand how much data is being processed:
-
Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles
I’m still kind of confused, so I’ll hope this isn’t a question on the next Google certification test.
