Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Google Sorts One Petabyte Of Data In 6 Hours - Analytics - InformationWeek

Google Sorts One Petabyte Of Data In 6 Hours - Analytics - InformationWeek
"According to last Friday's Official Google Blog, the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Systems Infrastructure Team has sorted a record 1 terabyte of data on 1,000 computers in only 68 seconds, which breaks the previous mark of 209 seconds established in July by Yahoo.

Team leader Grzegorz Czajkowski wrote that the team followed the rules of a standard terabyte sort benchmark and used Google's MapReduce software framework that supports parallel computations over large (multiple petabyte) data sets on clusters of computers. Yahoo's effort had featured a 910-node cluster, and used Hadoop, an open-source MapReduce implementation.

The sort benchmark, which was created in 1998 by computer scientist Jim Gray, specifies the input data (10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files), which must be completely sorted and written to disk. Not content with just rewriting the record book, the Google team then decided to up the ante in sorting massive volumes of data."
. . .
One petabyte is a thousand terabytes, or roughly 12 times the amount of archived Web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. One way to put that amount in perspective, according to Czajkowski, is to consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was, on average, 20 PB per day in January 2008. A paper explaining MapReduce on the Google labs site says that the upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day. So the infrastructure team's MapReduce job that extended the benchmark factors out to 50 typical MapReduce jobs, or one-twentieth the total of all daily MapReduce jobs run on Google's clusters.

Google v Microsoft

Microsoft Loses Internet Ground, Or Not? - Microsoft Blog - InformationWeek:

"Do the hit counters at ComScore have a different take on this situation? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quotes a ComScore study that shows Microsoft's search share holding steady. However, that refers to October versus September search share. If you eyeball the one-year graph in that story, you'll see essentially the same decline that Neilsen found.

Beneath these two contradictory headlines, there is actually some consistent data. Microsoft has lost about 20 percent of its market share in the past year, but in recent months has seemed to stop the bleeding. Yahoo has even managed a slight uptick in searches over the past two months. It makes you wonder whether the now-unlikely merger of these two would make any difference when both are so far behind Google."

Op-Ed Contributor - How to Publish Without Perishing - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - How to Publish Without Perishing - NYTimes.com:

"One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, Gutenberg, and now goodbye.)

But I don’t see it that way. I think, on the contrary, we’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology. Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again (it was never a good way to get rich), but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms."

A Maturing Google Buckles Down and Searches for Cost Savings - Advertising Age - Digital

A Maturing Google Buckles Down and Searches for Cost Savings - Advertising Age - Digital:

"NEW YORK (AdAge) -- The recession is reverberating even in the freewheeling halls of the Googleplex.

Proving that even the search giant isn't immune from the vagaries of the economy, Google is cutting its 10,000-strong contract staff, nixing some new products that won't pay back in the near term and aggressively trying to squeeze more out of existing revenue streams."

Google's Plan for Mobile Domination | Fast Company

Scobleizer: Google's Plan for Mobile Domination | Fast Company:
"In January, California will join the states that have made it illegal to text while driving. Google's voice-powered service, GOOG-411, is great for hands-free access to local information. Call 800-GOOG-411 and the system prompts you to tell it where you are and what you want. You can even have it send directions via a text message."

worth the click for more details

Monday, December 01, 2008

It's not Chrome v Firefox, it's Google v Microsoft

Free standards based at the last mile = controlling the screen.

Media News - European Journalism Centre:
"Google is considering pre-installing its Chrome browser on personal computers in the search giant's latest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The move would significantly ramp up the browser war that Google launched against Microsoft when it launched Chrome in September, in the battle to dominate how users access and interact with the web"