Q&A

[Peter]

Q.  How can Google search the entire internet in a fraction of a second when it takes my computer 30 minutes just to search through it's own hard drives?  Why can't my OS do whatever indexing trick Google does and find things instantly?

[Dexter Morgan]

Q.  How can Google search the entire internet in a fraction of a second when it takes my computer 30 minutes just to search through it's own hard drives?  Why can't my OS do whatever indexing trick Google does and find things instantly?

When you computer has a multibillion dollar business developing algorithms to quickly your hard drive, I'm sure it will easily happen.

[Calandale]

Google is NOT searching the entire internet.
It's got huge data warehouses, optimized
for finding certain things, and heavily redundant
in nature.

That's why sometimes you get a bum link.

[Peter]

Google is NOT searching the entire internet.
It's got huge data warehouses, optimized
for finding certain things, and heavily redundant
in nature.

That's why sometimes you get a bum link.

Surely my computer could have a little mini-storehouse of it's own contents?  I know that Google doesn't search the internet every time someone sends it a search request, but if Google can build a hash table or whatever that lets it conduct searches nearly instantly, my computer should be able to do the same for it's own contents, which are minuscule by comparison.  I guess that's what Google toolbar does, but I've never used it and don't plan to due to privacy considerations.

[odeon]

Google's indexes run on a system that does little else and is customized for the job. You can build a local index like that, but the Windows search and indexing functions aren't nearly as good. Try searching for indexing software on the Internet--lots of such programmes out there, from what I can see.

Or switch to a *nix OS.

[Calandale]

Moreover, google uses some heavy-duty search
algorithms, which optimize on particular words.
So, they can pull up the best results, based upon
other's searches.

Do you really think having your computer always looking
first in the same place, makes sense? Or, are you often searching
for different files each time?

If it's OS-related files (often the case for me) it is easier to find
out where they reside, by doing an internet search on the file
name, and then doing a refined search on my computer.

[Peter]

Do you really think having your computer always looking
first in the same place, makes sense? Or, are you often searching
for different files each time?

If it's OS-related files (often the case for me) it is easier to find
out where they reside, by doing an internet search on the file
name, and then doing a refined search on my computer.

Often I'll be looking for a file or folder, and I'll have an idea of what it's called, but I won't recall where I put it.  I have half a terabyte of files to keep track of, spread over 7 partitions, and if I'm unsure of where something is, it's often easier to have my computer chug through the disks for 30 minutes than for me to search for it manually.

[Calandale]

Might I suggest cataloging stuff? 

[odeon]

Pretty sure there's indexing software available that fits the bill.

[SovaNu]

why is the sky blue and invisible?

[Peter]

why is the sky blue and invisible?

The sky is blue because the atmosphere preferentially scatters photons of short wavelengths over photons of long wavelengths.  Long wavelengths of light such as red and yellow are thus able to pass directly through the atmosphere in a straight path, so they appear to come from the sun, while short wavelengths such as blue tend to zig-zag through the atmosphere due to interactions with matter so that they appear to come from all parts of the sky.  The atmosphere is transparent because photons in the range of visible wavelengths don't interact strongly with it due to the relative sizes of the photon wavelengths and the available quantum mechanical systems in the atmosphere and the energy carried by the photon compared with the permissible energy levels in those quantum mechanical systems, which limits photon absorption events, according to my rather limited understanding of the subject at any rate.