Google keeps bragging about all their internal capabilities because they want to hire people. But so what? If I had a real reason to, I could fire up a couple thousand machines on amazon and analyze data akimbo.<p>In a sense, google is worse than microsoft - they really don't share any of their hardcore cs innovations. At least MS is in the business of selling technology. Google is in the business of hoarding it in order to derive competitive advantage in advertising.<p>I just wrote up an entry about this at <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972368" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972368</a>
Their benchmarks seem a little odd. They claim an 11x speed improvement, compared to using half as many computers three years ago. But you'd expect roughly an order of magnitude improvement anyway, just due to Moore's law.<p>I'd be really curious to see what part of the speedup is due to software optimizations, i.e., compare the 2011 software with the 2008 software on identical hardware.