The Amazing Flexibility of Google
Google has been a pioneer in the field of online searching. It has made other companies scratch their heads in amazement as its search engines burn through millions and millions of sites in seconds without a sign of tiring down. Companies as big as Microsoft and Yahoo have still not been able to accomplish what Google managed to accomplish a decade back. It is amazing that its search engines are able to scale up their search to the astonishingly increasing number of websites. It even manages to update itself at the same time. Not just search, they have an amazing scalability in other areas as well, be it to introduce a new technology, online book database, Google maps, Google news search, Google blog search, and the examples could go on. Just the size of these applications is staggering; take for instance the Google Scholar and Google Books, these applications have a scanned and read copy of a staggering number of books, articles, magazines and even flyers. It can be called the ruler of scalability. Be it to scale up or scale down maps for use on cell phones, Google does everything effectively and without even going offline as other sites like Apple do. Apple uses site shutting down as a public relations stunt rather than a real motive to upgrade the site.
The secret to this can be dependent on the platform that is used by Google. Their platform allows them to built applications that can be easily scaled. MapReduce is one of Google's platforms that is used in Google Maps. Map Reduce can sort more than one Peta Byte (100,000 Giga Byte) of data in around six hours. This sort of processing power for one application is a theoretical nightmare. Their platform is Linx based with languages such as Java, Python and even C++.