Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks an Expansion of Power

John Markoff and Saul Hansell report on Google’s massive data center construction project in Oregon: two football-field-size data centers, each with a four-story cooling plant.

Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users.

★ Wednesday, 14 June 2006