The Global Id: Intressant om Google i senaste London Review of Books:

Google does not run on huge, expensive mainframe computers but on a very large number of bog-standard, over-the-counter PCs, the same sort used by ordinary mortals. The PCs are tweaked and cabled together in particular ways to provide Google’s ‘special sauce’ – this is one of the revelations in David Vise’s book – and run a customised, stripped-down version of Linux. When a PC breaks, they chuck it away and replace it. Nobody knows just how many of these PCs Google has. John Hennessy, the president of Stanford and a Google board member, says that it’s ‘the largest computer system in the world’ – Vise puts the figure at more than 100,000 PCs.

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More generally, the biggest single area of worry about Google involves privacy. This has been a long-running subject of concern on the net, but thanks to an op-ed piece in the New York Times in November it has begun to attract some wider attention. The paper pointed out that the prosecution in a recent North Carolina strangulation case drew into evidence the fact that the defendant had made Google searches on the words 'neck' and 'snap'.