title: How can Google be so fast?
body: <p>What are the technologies and programming decisions that make Google able to serve a query so fast? </p>
  
  <p>Every time I search something (one of the several times per day) it always amazes me how they serve the results in near or less than 1 second time. What sort of configuration and algorithms could they have in place that accomplishes this?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Side note:</strong> It is kind of overwhelming thinking that even if I was to put a desktop application and use it on my machine probably would not be half as fast as Google. Keep on learning I say.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Here are some of the great answers and pointers provided:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Google Platform</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Map Reduce</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Algorithms carefully crafted</a></li>
  <li>Hardware - cluster farms and massive number of cheap computers</li>
  <li>Caching and Load Balancing</li>
  <li><a href="http://research.google.com/archive/gfs-sosp2003.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Google File System</a></li>
  </ul>