
Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it - vaksel
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/27/google_mocks_microsoft_online_infrastructure/
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rbanffy
Congratulations for Microsoft. They are currently in the #2 in the four step
Gandhi scale:

1) they ignore you 2) they laugh at you 3) they fight you 4) you win

Let's hope they never get beyond 2.

~~~
echair
They're walking down those steps, though, not up. The next step is 1, not 3.

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rbanffy
I genuinely hope you are right

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kyro
Why?

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rbanffy
Because Microsoft's monopolies are hurting competition and the evolution of
our practices. We certainly don't need them pushing a new search engine
through MSN Messenger or Windows updates.

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ori_b
No, that's Google that has a search monopoly at the moment, and seriously
needs a challenger.

~~~
rbanffy
Perhaps, but is Microsoft, a convicted monopoly abuser, the right challenger?
Microsoft has already a powerful grip on the whole industry (why do you think
multi-processors and 64-bit computing took that long to catch?) for us to feel
too comfortable with them gaining more power.

Google has a monopoly on search, but Microsoft has a couple at least as
valuable as Google's.

~~~
trevelyan
Competition between giants is a good thing. And a sense of urgency in the
marketplace is good for third party companies, as it places pressure to buy
rather than build.

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neilc
_Actually, Microsoft uses Hadoop. But that's only because it recently
purchased the semantic search startup Powerset. Not only is open-source slow
to reach the Microsoft back-end, but so is, well, the cloud._

Actually, Microsoft's Dryad project is significantly more sophisticated than
Hadoop. Using Hadoop is not exactly a compelling example of how technically
sophisticated your organization is or how much you utilize "the cloud",
anyway.

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miloshh
Of course, Google's infrastructure is great, whether MapReduce or GFS.

However, if Bing gets to a point where their search results are clearly
better, then Google will be in trouble, and no amount of screaming "we have a
better infrastructure!" will help. Users want the best results, and that's why
Google originally won against other search engines.

I don't know if that's ever going to happen. Probably not, but I would not bet
on it.

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ntoshev
Is the talk available online or at least, is there alternative coverage? The
Register conveys the message "Google thinks Microsoft infrastruture sucks",
but they don't seem to understand the arguments (or at least, I can't
understand their coverage without guessing a lot).

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trezor
To be honest I don't think google is being entirely fair here.

Google provides me with a _service_. In that respect I don't care how that
service is provided and on what technology that is based. It could be a giga-
cluster of retrofitted Commodore 64s thrown out in orbit to save on real
estate costs, kept in place by a reinforced fiber back down to Google HQ. As
long as the service works, I wouldn't care less.

This gives google complete freedom in their implementation, so they pretty
much built up their own infrastructure from scratch, for a very specific
purpose.

Microsoft on the other side delivers software, general purpose platforms which
you can deploy and build your own solutions on. Granted, they got the whole
internet thing a little late, but I can't blame them for trying to exploit the
technology they already posses instead of ditching it all and starting from
scratch.

With Microsoft's solutions, I know I can make them do whatever I want, on
pretty much any x86 hardware, and I know it will work. "Google OS", for a lack
of better name, I doubt would be particularly useful for the general public.

I don't think it's surprising for a platform tailored for one specific goal to
perform better than general purpose platforms in that specific area, but that
hardly means that the other platform is worthless.

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jaydub
I understood the article to be focusing on Microsoft vs. Google in terms of
their approach to the same set of challenges in the web sphere. (" _Google has
questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure_ ")

In this respect, it would seem that Google's "horizontal" infrastructure stack
makes it more adept at handling web-scale problems across multiple domains
(versus Microsoft's "vertical" problem-by-problem approach).

~~~
DocSavage
Agreed. This debate was in the context of cloud computing. After working with
Google App Engine and their datastore API, I more fully appreciate the
willpower required by their developers.

Some queries that would be relatively easy (and not super-scalable) have to be
reformulated so computation is done on write and not on read. An example is
writing an app that uses ranking and decay:
<http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html>

There's a different set of tricks to learn, so in the context of cloud
computing, if you aren't willing to confine your approaches to those amenable
to truly distributed cloud computing, you're not addressing the basic
problems. Of course, there will be apps that can work effectively without web-
scale, but are you talking about the "cloud" at that point or just hosted
apps?

