Search engines - Google & Windows search bar

[Nouman]

When I search a file on my HD in Windows 7 or Windows XP it takes some minutes to finish the process. If I fill in a search term in Google, the answer is on my screen in milliseconds

How is it possible for Google to search the Internet, which is many times larger than my hard drive, faster than my OS can search my computer?

 

[GokAy]

:devil:Google works with the devil!:devil:

Joke aside:

Recent guesstimates have placed Google's server count at more than 1 million. But new data on Google's energy use suggests that the company is probably running about 900,000 servers. Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. Aug 1, 2011

Note the date of that estimate, wonder how many it would be now?

 

[Nouman]

Is there any logic beside this answer?
I didnt find any .. Because its simply a comparison between two search engines .. The windows search and google search .
The google result is from different servers which are present in different countries but windows search is present in itself and why it takes too long to search any file from the nearest hardware which is its own hard drive ?

 

[Callender]

Personally I ditched Windows Search a long time ago. Windows Search is disabled on my machine. I use alternatives - for a quick file or folder name search I use SwiftSearch (NTFS drives only) and it's ridiculously fast. For text within files I use Grep or UltraFileSearch.

 

[Nouman]

Thats a great help .. But the question is still unanswered .. Why google searches early than windows search file systems.

 

[logicearth]

The google search can and does finish faster because of optimized indexes (Google is not searching the internet in real time) and a whole lot of processing power as well as a butt load of memory to hold most of the data it needs.

On the windows search side it can be much faster if you properly setup the indexing system. But if you are just doing a file search on some part of the HDD that is not indexed it must traverse though the file system and over the storage media. Storage devices are considerably slower then reading an index from memory thus it takes time.

Just to be clear, when you are Searching for something on Google, they are not going around traversing the internet as you conduct your search. They have a pre-computed index that is what your search is traversing though.

 

[Alejandro85]

Google has also MUCH more hardware than you can possibly dream of. They cache no only highly optimized indexes, but also query results themselves. That is, if two users search the same thing, they do the index seeking the first time, cache that, then the second user gets the same results. Being the number 1 website worldwide, with the number of people searching, it's very likely that whatever you search, other people asked that before, so it just return the same results, without calculating them again. Also, having a highly distributed array of servers, it's likely that the one serving your request is physically close to you, further reducing waits.

Local searchs, on the other hand, have nothing like that. It just traverse the file system each time, withthe typical lag of an HD read, possibly with the OS competing for IO and CPU time too. None of the optimizations that Google does are present in your local machine (and having those will eat all your computing power).