An article that I found interesting about google's back office operations

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http://informationweek.com/story/sho...cleID=60404858

Google Inc. owes its success in part to the unique computing architecture it invented to suit its business--serving up searches of the Web to millions of users with lightning-fast speed.

Attendees at the EclipseCon conference in Burlingame, Calif., Wednesday were treated to a glimpse of how that technology was developed in Google's early days and how that technology operates today, courtesy of a speech by Urs Hoelzle, Google's VP of engineering.

EclipseCon is the second annual meeting of users of the Eclipse open-source programmer's workbench, a platform that helps unrelated software-development tools work together.

To invent Google's technology, developers had to throw out assumptions previously used in large data centers and implant new ones, Hoelzle told attendees. And because exactly what will be searched for on any given day is never predictable, keeping the 10 billion pages of the Web close at hand is a daunting challenge.

Hoelzle, a man with a short black beard and quick wit, told audience members that a Google search on "Eclipse" produced more results for solar events and the Mitsubishi car than their favorite development environment. "So everyone here, get back to work," he admonished his listeners, who chuckled in response....

Full article at the url listed above.