'And if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own.'<p>BSD's hash table code has been around since probably longer than the author has been alive.<p>Here is the FreeBSD version, it's very compact and works quite well: <a href="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/db/hash/hash.c?rev=1.23.2.1.2.1;content-type=text%2Fplain" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/db/hash/h...</a>
This post seems to miss the point that the major hurdle faced by a 14-year old trying to learn how to program and find the right libraries etc. to use is solved by Google itself.
I thought Google's real innovation was their technique of using the interconnectedness of the web to determine the true value of content. So rather than only looking at the content of a page, they also look at the content from incoming links to that page. What package out there implements the algorithms for this, and is well-documented and trivial enough to use that a 14-year-old can understand them?<p>As far as I can tell, this article says 1) Shucks, hardware sure is cheap these days! and 2) There sure is a lot of software out there that you can mash together! Those things make it easier to start a company, but they don't provide the essential insights that make that company truly revolutionary.
<i>By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages</i><p>Sounds like a marvelous challenge. Anyone have other similar "technological frontier then, high-school science fair project now" type challenges? OPer notes BioCurious as one. A major factor in education is walking kids thru a subject from basic principles to state-of-the-art, recreating historical milestones along the way.
For extremely contrived definitions of "1998's Google" yes. But if all it took was a pile of servers and hard-drives for 1998's Google to succeed then a lot more other companies would have done so as well. It takes more than that to build a company.
I think the heart of Google (at least at the get-go) was PageRank. Sure you had to write a web crawler, but that wasn't the magic sauce that made Google's search so good. I don't think most 14 year olds could understand the math behind PageRank, much less derive it from scratch.
I'm not sure whether this is applicable but my main objection with this article is that the numbers don't add up. How many Ph.D. candidates do you know who are granted a budget of $10k+ to do their research? Surely something else must have been going on to shrink the expenses to a more acceptable amount.<p>Then again, according to the wikipedia page the original BackRub was conceived when the web was only 10 million pages large, $2000 is considerably more acceptable for a Ph.D. project.
tl;dr version: Computers and disks are a lot cheaper now.<p>Basically the article boils down to this, what counted as a 'cluster' in 1998 is a single system in 2008, what used to take hundreds of disk drives to store, you can store on 1 today.<p>Not particularly deep, but useful to think about from time to time. There is a quote, perhaps apocryphal, which says<p>"There are two ways to solve a problem that would take 1000 computers 10 years to solve. One is to buy a 1000 computers and start crunching the numbers, the other is party for 9 years, use as much of the money as you need to buy the best computer you can at the end of the 9th year, and compute the answer in one day."<p>The idea that computers get more powerful every year, and that in 10 years they will be more than 1000x more powerful than the ones you would have started with so one can solve the same problem.<p>Of course they haven't been getting as powerful as quickly as they once were, but the amount of data you can store per disk has continued to outperform.<p>The point is that if you are designing for the long haul (say 10 yrs from now) you can probably assume a much more powerful compute base and a lot more data storage.
Where does to 200Gb figure come from? I was quite busy building a web crawler too at the time and I can distinctly remember that our crawlers had about 17Tb of storage. So let's say we had crawled something like 15Tb of data to get a meaningful sample of the web.<p>I agree with the gist of the blog posting though.
If you think a 14 year old could build something as complicated as 1998's google.com, think of what an adult with training could do at the same time with the same resources. As technology advances, so do our expectations.
The author makes a great point about technology advancing so quickly that the bleeding edge of just yesterday is now just cute compared what we have now and about how cheap of a commodity server hardware has now become.<p>Unfortunately he had to use the 14 year old girl analogy and exaggerate the ease with we could build Google circa '98 today. Now his whole point is lost to click clacking of a thousand pedants' keyboards. Guys, this isn't about 14 year old girls nor is it about Google per se as much as it is about the fast pace of tech innovation, the ease and costs associated with acquiring infrastructure, and to a lesser extent there's a tiny but about how we're totally spoiled compared to what we had to work with 14 years ago.<p>The stuff about Google and 14 year old girls is just a literary tool (along with some mild hyperbole) to help illustrate his point which so far is getting completely missed. Come on guys, is this Hacker News or Pedantic Literary Scholar News? Focus on the point, not little Google girls. PLSN does have a nice ring to it but no, we're not on PSLN. At least not yet.
So, just a gripe about your startup plug at the end of the article.<p>Look, I don't care whether your product cures cancer, dispenses oral sexual favors, and mints pure gold dubloons-- I will not give you my email address without a damned good reason.<p>Every single goddamn link on your page brings me to a "Enter your email here" prompt, except for the company tab, which brings me instead to a pile of vapid marketing bullshit.<p><i>Flotype Inc. is a venture-backed company building a suite of enterprise technology for real-time messaging. Flotype takes a unique approach by building developer-friendly technologies focused on ease-of-use and simplicity, while still exceeding enterprise-grade performance expectations.<p>Flotype licenses enterprise-grade middleware, Bridge, to customers ranging from social web and software enterprises to financial and fleet management groups.</i><p>What does that even mean? You using carrier pidgins? Dwarves? Cyborgs? UDP? ZeroMQ? Smoke signals?<p>You don't even tell me how my email is going to be used.<p>Fix your shit.