Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

I don't like assumption 'Google'=='search engine'. There was Altavista and dozens other search engines before Google.

Work force is grossly overestimated. 99% queries could be filtered with simple encyclopedia lookup. For rest some sort of caching would be used. I think you would need about 10 000 people to constantly handle this type of load without any computers.

View on HN

"This is really what the search engine that Google launched in 1998 did that was so great. Its results were ordered in a way that seemed like magic."

Yes, but it also means that Google innovation was not worth two million workers. All Google did was better results over Altavista. It is 10,000 searches a day, each search saves client 10 minutes (thanks to better result ordering), that is 70 people working nonstop.

Google also has fresher content. It's not a matter if just indexing and querying, it's also updating the index. You have to account for that.

This type of discussion is pretty pointless anyway, but since we started ;-)

I have a few comments about second article "The boat engine is worth 33500 Egyptian slaves"

First ancient Egyptians did not use slaves. Workforce in Old Kingdom which build pyramids were free men. Later it was more similar to feudalism. (BTW: women had more rights in Ancient Egypt than most women in 20th century)

Also towing is not really necessary on river Nile. There are northerly winds for most of year, so one could just use sail to travel upstream.

And third; 'Pharaoh Nile Express ' actually exist, but it had only 30 rowers :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khufu_ship

    All Google did was better results over Altavista

"All"? What else do you think a search engine is for?

The first time I did a search in AltaVista I was amazed and it really did seem like magic. Within an hour it was no longer magic and was just a nice technical feat. So when Google came along is was too late for this stuff to be magic, but they clearly did the technical feat better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com