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With millions of users searching for so many things on google, yahoo and so on. How can the server handle so many concurrent searches? I have no clue as to how they made it so scalable. Any insight into their architecture would be welcomed.

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    Considering how thousands of great Google engineers have been working on this for over a decade, it's probably fair to say a single ServerFault question won't do it any justice
    – philfreo
    May 29, 2010 at 17:22

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There are numerous case studies and talks by Google engineers available online with a little searching. Suffice it to say that Google Search is highly distributed and pushed out datacenters all over the world.

There's a ton of information available over at http://highscalability.com/google-architecture.

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  • One example is the paper published years ago on disk failures (at the time, estimates were they had 800,000 servers). And the paper on MapReduce, just to name a two. Oct 9, 2013 at 2:32
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As has been mentioned, the networks and architecture of large-scale websites is highly distributed across many data centers and tens of thousands of servers. If you're interested in how this works, I'd recommend a book called Scalable Internet Architectures which describes some of the concepts and theories behind scalable and distributed systems.

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  • One estimate I read a few years ago said 800,000 servers. Oct 9, 2013 at 2:33
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Among other things, they use 100,000's of servers, and MapReduce. Massively parallel.