Web search
Web search has emerged as a major growth industry in the last decade, with recent figures indicating that the global number of searches has risen to over 10 billion per calendar month. The task of a web search engine is to index the entire contents of the World Wide Web, encompassing a wide range of information styles including web pages, multimedia sources and (scanned) books. This is a very complex task, as current estimates state that the Web consists of over 63 billion pages and one trillion unique web
Finance and commerce - The growth of eCommerce as exemplified by companies such as Amazon and eBay, and underlying payments technologies such as PayPal; the associated emergence of online banking and trading and also complex information dissemination systems for financial markets.
The information society - The growth of the World Wide Web as a repository of information and knowledge; the development of web search engines such as Google and Yahoo to search this vast repository; the emergence of digital libraries and the large-scale digitization of legacy information sources such as books (for example, Google Books); the increasing significance of user-generated content through sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr; the emergence of social networking through services such as Facebook and MySpace.
Creative industries and entertainment - The emergence of online gaming as a novel and highly interactive form of entertainment; the availability of music and film in the home through networked media centres and more widely in the Internet via downloadable or streaming content; the role of user-generated content (as mentioned above) as a new form of creativity, for example via services such as YouTube; the creation of new forms of art and entertainment enabled by emergent (including networked) technologies.
Healthcare - The growth of health informatics as a discipline with its emphasis on online electronic patient records and related issues of privacy; the increasing role of telemedicine in supporting remote diagnosis or more advanced services such as remote surgery (including collaborative working between healthcare teams); the increasing application of networking and embedded systems technology in assisted living, for example for monitoring the elderly in their own homes.
Education - The emergence of e-learning through for example web-based tools such as virtual learning environments; associated support for distance learning; support for collaborative or community-based learning.
Transport and logistics - The use of location technologies such as GPS in route finding systems and more general traffic management systems; the modern car itself as an example of a complex distributed system (also applies to other forms of transport such as aircraft); the development of web-based map services such as MapQuest, Google Maps and Google Earth.
Science The emergence - of the Grid as a fundamental technology for science including the use of complex networks of computers to support the storage, analysis, and processing of (often very large quantities of) scientific data; the associated use of the Grid as an enabling technology for worldwide collaboration between groups of scientists.
the natural environment, for The use of (networked) sensor technology to both monitor and manage Environmental management example to provide early warning of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods or tsunamis and to co ordinate emergency response; the collation and analysis of global environmental parameters to better understand complex natural phenomena such as climate change addresses. Given that most search engines analyze the entire web content and then carry out sophisticated processing on this enormous database, this task itself represents a major challenge for distributed systems design.
Google, the market leader in web search technology, has put significant effort into the design of a sophisticated distributed system infrastructure to support search (and indeed other Google applications and services such as Google Earth). This represents one of the largest and most complex distributed systems installations in the history of computing and hence demands close examination. Highlights of this infrastructure include:
• an underlying physical infrastructure consisting of very large numbers of networked computers located at data centers all around the world.
• a distributed file system designed to support very large files and heavily optimized for the style of usage required by search and other Google applications (especially reading from files at high and sustained rates).
• an associated structured distributed storage system that offers fast access to very large datasets.
• a lock service that offers distributed system functions such as distributed locking and agreement.
• a programming model that supports the management of very large parallel and distributed computations across the underlying physical infrastructure.
Further details on Google’s distributed systems services and underlying communications support can be found in Chapter 21, a compelling case study of a modern distributed system in action.
Frequently Asked Questions
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