GOOGLE AND BEYOND

摘要

Google is synonymous with web search. Some 60 per cent of surfers use it, performing roughly 2.4 billion searches every day. All these clicks combined to earn the company a cool $6.5 billion profit last year. But if you dream of muscling in on some of this fortune you should be aware of what you are letting yourself in for. Building a search engine is like compiling a searchable index for a trillion-page book. The index has to be contained on a limited number of servers, and each of its entries must be stored in such a way that the whole thing can be searched in milliseconds. Then you must face the fact that the web's contents constantly change and that most searches are f rustratingly vague -just three words long, on average.