How can I learn about the technologies used at Google?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Thomas Greiner in Austria. Thomas asks, “Can you tell us some key characteristics of the technologies and the architecture behind Google’s index?” Wow, great question. A lot of people are like, oh, Google is so secretive. But if you go back and look at the literature and the papers that Google has produced, we’ve actually documented a lot about the mechanics and our data centers and how Google operates. So if you want to go back into the very early days, Larry and Sergey have these papers about the anatomy of a large scale hypertextual search engine, page rank. You can find all of those in Sightseer or Google Scholar, or any sort of research search place. If you are looking for more recent stuff, Jeff Dean is a Google fellow and he does amazing talks. So he’ll often talk about the various things like, every programmer should know the difference between how long it takes to do a disk seek versus looking something up in RAM, versus doing something across data centers across the country. He does these really great talks, so I’d look up anything by Jeff Dean. Another person to talk or to do some research is Urs Hoelzle. So he often writes about our data center architecture. Luiz Barroso is another person. So we’ll try to enter a few links in the description of the video, but also check out the Google research team, because when there are papers published by Googlers, we’ll often add links to those papers. So a lot of people think, oh, it’s hard to find out things about how Google works. Not only do we blog, show up at conferences, listen on forums, do webmaster videos, show up at conferences– all these things– we also try to talk about what we do in the academic literature, we publish in IEEE and ACM– lots of good stuff along those lines. And so check into that a little bit, because there is really a lot of good data about how Google operates in terms of the technology, as far as the machinery, all that sort of stuff. Do check into it because it can be really interesting.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: