Google Two Years Into Overhaul of the Google File System

El Reg writes "As its ten-year-old file system — GFS — struggles to keep up with Gmail, YouTube, and other apps it was never designed to support, Google is brewing a replacement. According to the company, it's two years into a GFS sequel designed specifically for customer-facing apps that require ultra low latency."

Re:Curiously

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is not a truck [youtube.com].

Re:hmm

[mysidia]

Yahoo was originally a web directory, not a conventional search engine. The search results were provided by others.

In 2000, they signed an agreement with Google, and Yahoo's search was powered by Google, in other words -- if you used Yahoo, you were using Google.

That didn't change until 2005, and after several other search engine company acquisitions, when they developed their own search technology.

Re:hmm

[jcnnghm]

You know from June 2000 to February 2004 Google was the backend for the Yahoo web page search. That was back when Yahoo was a web site "human directory" search first and foremost, and only secondarily a machine-powered internet search. Sort of like how Yahoo search is going to be powered by Bing in the future, and was powered by Inktomi before Google.

Re:hmm

[Mostly a lurker]

Your recollections are different from mine. Prior to Google, I tended to use AltaVista and Hotbot. Searches took at least ten times as long. Results rarely included any recently created pages. The number of indexed pages was several orders of magnitude less than Google handles today (which in turn is one order of magnitude, or so, greater than current competitors). In spite of the fact that gaming of search engines is overwhelmingly targeted at Google, Google still does a relatively better job of finding the genuinely useful pages. Is Google perfect? No, of course not. Search is still only a partially solved problem. However, since its inception, Google has come up with most of the practical advances in the state of the art, as well as the best infrastructure for its implementation.

Re:hmm

[Xemu]

It takes absolutely zero effort for this post to be modded funny

It doesn't take much to be modded informative either.

Re:Better back your files up

[fracai]

Couple days?

Install OfflineIMAP or Getmail, write the config file, schedule cron, launchd, etc., and be done with it. Shouldn't take more than an hour. The bulk of that should be working through the config and both products include healthy examples.

Re:hmm

[mysidia]

Directory entries were submitted, reviewed, moderated, and maintained by humans.

Search Engines were automated, and very poor. At first they didn't have much indexed, then they got things indexed, but your search terms would turn up irrelevant hits, and you would sometimes have to dig to the 12th or 13th page to find the most relevant, most reputable / highest quality page.

A little later search engines got a little better, but started pushing sponsored results, and keyword spammers started flooding the first 10 pages of search results on popular search terms. The spammers of the world and "dot coms" became very good at manipulating search engines, the result was when you searched, you got tons of totally unrelated hits that had been kw-spammed or put there through other trickery.

And thankfully, now we have Google. Which performs some decent filtering of much of the search spam to help downgrade the low-reputation irrelevant sites in search results. And also does an excellent job at finding highly relevant pages on quality sites.

Oh yes, and the sponsored links are clearly labelled, and separated from the normal search results; so it's not "if you're our sponsor, your site quietly gets the number 1 search position".

By the way, the Yahoo directory [yahoo.com] still exists, so you can see somewhat how it was like, if you perform all your web searches only on 'Search: The directory' and don't choose the new 'Search the web' option

However, even that has been improved over the years.