Single Google Search Query Uses 1000 Machines To Give Results In 0.2 Seconds

How much resources Google uses to provide results for your search query? It uses thousand machines to compile results in less than thousand milliseconds.

Google Fellow Jeff Dean gave this impressive figure in a keynote talk at WSDM 2009. He talked about how Google has grown in the last 10 years.

Google indexes all sites and stores information in a network of servers. Previously Google used 12 machines to handle a single search query, whereas it uses a staggering 1,000 machines now.

The search queries as well as its processing power (number of machines x speed of the machines) has increased by a factor of 1,000 according to Jeff Dean.

He said the latency (the time Google takes to provide the results) has reduced considerably from around 1,000 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds. The web crawler it uses updates now in minutes compared to months before in 1999.

Since Google uses 1,000 machines one would expect that it will use enormous power but unlike other it uses only 0.0003KWh of energy making it the “world’s most efficient” data centers.