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How does Google get such fast response times?

I had an interview Friday and was asked that question and was told this firm uses this same method for near-instant response against millions of patient records. I was told to "think about it" before my next interview.

So I am curious how search results can be grouped when you have various elements inputted, such as:

First Name
Age
Sex

The Google example involved multiple search words.

I am curious to hear a few different ideas on this.

Thanks

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johnsone

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Pavel Celba

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slightwv (䄆 Netminder)

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curiouswebster

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thanks

johnsone

Using the "same method", doesn't mean using the same algorithms. You don't need a Google appliance to do searching, in fact to do it the way that Google does it, you really need several of them.

Purpose built data warehouse systems (think the IBM Netezza product and its similar competitors), do massively parallel operations. They don't have any indexes in their database. Rather than one database server going through all the data, it breaks the database up into many pieces and each piece is searched by its own server.

I'm not sure if Oracle's Exadata product does it exactly this way, but it is possible. I don't think it has the levels of parallelism that the other products do, they just throw more hardware at it.