How Google works
The Google data center is not filled with super expensive high tech brand name gear such as Sun, Dell, or Microsoft Exchange. Instead, Google has a large farm of sleek and stripped PCs with the motherboards circuit screwed onto a plain metal slab, with each hard drive attached to the contraptions by a plain old Velcro strap. There are 15000 Google computers, as described above, in the Google farm. The Google farm of computers is growing at the rate of 1500 new machines a month. These super fast machines have RAM in the gigabytes, spanking fast hard drives, and they are running Linux—one of the best and fastest free operating systems.
One example I used in the Forensic ICT module was a ‘link spammed’ WordPress 1.2 install. Link spamming us an attempt by a commercial site increase the number of pages that link to the site – thus raising the Google score for the site even though the site (a casino in the case of the WordPress link spam) has nothing to do with the contents of the spammed page.
This raised the issue of how Google works, and Eric Wolfram’s page about how Google works has some fascinating facts and insights. He links Google ranking with good Web design and meaningful markup. Wolfram’s page is argumentative in nature and he is making a case for external links. Web Design students might want to ask themselves if they agree with Wolfram’s ideas as a way of focussing their own thoughts.