How Google Works - In Depth Look At The Company

Ziff Davis publishes a magazine called Baseline, to which I am a subscriber. Back in July, 2006 it published an article about Google and how the company operates. The story is somewhat long, but if you are so inclined to read it, it makes for some great insight into how Google functions.

I found the article interesting since we know little about the company, except that it has a very good search engine. But behind the scenes there is much more to this multi-faceted company. The most obvious is its use of over 450,000 servers in data centers all over the planet. And it continues to build ’server farms’ around the globe.

In addition, Google employees (for the most part) write their own software in house. Though the company still uses third party software for some applications, most of its software is written and supported by Linux. And it does not buy OEM hardware, but instead has the servers built per its own specifications. Rumor has it that it has shunned Intel in favor of AMD processors.

I guess the biggest news is that Google has been touted as a ‘Microsoft killer.’ Rumors abound about how Google has aligned itself to offer online products, which in theory will make the need for a Windows based system a thing of the past.

I hope that you enjoy reading the article as much as I did. There is plenty of insight on how this fairly secretive company operates.

You can read the complete article here. Enjoy.

[tags]google, linux, microsoft, applications, software, rumor, microsoft killer[/tags]