[Info-vax] [OT] Google search

[Dan Cross]

In article <v24th6$1i7qe$1 at dont-email.me>,
Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>On 2024-05-15, Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>>
>> Consider, instead, Google search.  If you go to `google.com`,
>> you actually get a pretty simple interface: right now, for me,
>> it's just the Google logo, a text box, and a few buttons.  I
>> enter my search term into the text box and click "Google Search"
>> and off I go.  But!  When I click that button, I am one of many
>> millions of users in that same second simultaneously clicking
>> that button; in order to serve all of those users
>> simultaneously, there is an enormous pile of resources sitting
>> behind that simple web page that lets it scale.  And when I
>> say enormous, I mean enormous: O(10^6) individual servers with
>> O(10^7) CPUs and many petabytes of RAM total, exabytes of
>> stable storabe, and terrabits of network bandwidth all
>> connecting them, in a constellation of globally distributed
>> data centers often built to be near redundant, high-capacity
>> electricity sources (i.e., built near a dam, say).
>>
>
>If Google search gets any worse, that problem will end up solving
>itself as people stop using it.
>
>For goodness sake, a Russian search engine (Yandex) currently gives
>me far higher quality search results for a number of things than
>Google currently does.
>
>I try Google first, and then try Yandex second if I don't find it on Google.
>
>At the rate things are going, that order of searching is going to be
>reversed as over the last few years Google search results have turned
>from specific high-quality results into utter generic crap.

This may be true, but it very much misses the forest for the
trees.  Do you think that Yandex, as a service, is administered
is very much different in how it scales and how the
infrastructure is built out?  Or Azure, Meta, AWS, etc?  Ali
Baba?

It's all well and good to gripe over the state of "things these
days" over a beer or two.  It's another thing entirely to ignore
the reality of modern systems and their scale requirements and
chalk it all up to people just not knowing what they're doing.

	- Dan C.