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This is a great question, so let me try to give an overview, including both hardware and software.In the beginning, in 1998, Google started with an index of about 100 million documents, with the ranking and other code written in C.One of the principal limitation in those days was disk space, which was rather expensive, about $100/GB (hard to believe now :) )So their initial storage costs were in the $100K+ range, assuming a TB or less index.Bandwidth was then expensive too, when T1 lines were all the rage costing $1K/mo for 1.44 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth (!). The initial index was static and updated rather infrequently (months). I would say that they operated on 10Mbps+ or so of dedicated bandwidth in the early days.From the very Beginning, Google operated Linux which is what they use to this day. Note that in the early days the did not have anything such as the Google File System (GFS), but instead relied more on Linux filesystems such as NFS and its many variants.GFS did not come until 2003 Google File System.Looking at hardware, it was Linux desktops at the very beginning, with racks and 1U machines soon after.In 2000, a company called FAST, running a site alltheweb.com, beat Google to the first 1 billion documents search index using a then novel document-partitioned index. Google quickly responded by overhauling its architecture and surpassing FAST but the surprising challenge was bit of a wakeup call.The main constraint of early search engines, persisting until not that long ago, was RAM. The mismatch in access speed between RAM and disk was huge (tens or hundreds of nanoseconds vs. milliseconds) so one of the principal goals was to mask extreme slowness of disks by parallelism and clever software.The holy grail of search hardware was to keep the entire index in RAM, which was then prohibitively expensive. For instance, the cost of RAM in 2000 was about $1K/GB, and it took 100TB of RAM to hold a 5 billion documents index in RAM, costing $100M which was a nice chunk of change then even for Google :)To their credit, there are indications they had in-RAM index as early as 2001 (e.g. see excellent presentation by Google fellow Jeff Dean WSDM09 Keynote)So by 2004, Google was running on GFS, on a sea of simple Linux boxes tightly coupled on fast networks within datacenter. The entire index was also in RAM.From the very beginning, Google was running so many boxes that they focused on their own designs, first racks, then motherboards, switches, power supplies etc.Here is a picture of their 1000th rack ever produced (from Urs Hoelzle, Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure)After GFS, Google continued to rapidly innovate their software by introducing MapReduce (2004) and BigTable (2006).In the beginning, Google was updating index very slowly, on the order of months. The updates were batch oriented, including both index and ranking. Compared to the advances in hardware, platform and overall infrastructure the index progress was rather static.Google addressed these shortcomings in 2009 by announcing Caffeine (2009), an almost complete overhaul of the indexing system which greatly increased the frequency of updates as well the portion of documents which were updated (much) more frequently.It should be noted that portion is still rather small, even to this day. Try running searches with time restrictions and comparing numbers of results to the general search.Google has continued developing their custom hardware (Built-in UPS servers , Top-of-Rack TOR network switches, modular datacenters).They are typically secretive about it, with some notable exceptions, which do seem to be increasing in frequency, but with a lag.For instance, drops in the cost and increased availability of SSD has helped a lot to reduce hardware and energy consumption footprints and increase speeds.But these costs have become almost meaningless compared to gargantuan revenue Google has been able to generate off search.It has been rumored for years that their core search runs on few tens of thousands (some say 5000) machines and that they devote an order of magnitude more resources to advertising, including both hardware and people.I happen to mostly agree with such estimates, of course, if anyone from Google would like to elucidate us on that (and other) subjects, please do :)

I wholeheartedly agree with Daniel Schwartz Carigiet that your best presentation tool is yourself. And when using a software tool, of course "garbage in, garbage out." But, over the years and many thousands of presentations, I find that visuals can be tremendously helpful in helping the audience remember and understand key points, as well as "attention grabbers."The 3 softwares I use most frequently, for their different qualities, are Haikudeck, PowerPoint and Keynote. Since you are familiar with the latter two, I will address Haikudeck.Haikudeck has 7 qualities I like very much, as I often travel to give presentations, and am always looking for useful, powerful visuals.1. HD is designed to ensure (or at least provide the opportunity for) powerful visuals with minimal text.2. HD provides immediate access to topic-related GREAT photos, which may be used, either free or minimal cost.3. Haikudeck automatically creates a list of credits for photos at the back of the deck, alleviating concerns about accidental plagiarism or forgetting where you got the pic.4. HD is available through all my devices, PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone - so that I can work on decks or create one on the fly.5. You can also access your decks from anywhere online - eliminating the risk of (ack!) forgetting your flash drive or having compatibility problems.6. You can share in various ways, and can create joint pptx/haikudecks. Really useful!7. Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, CEO Adam Tratt and his team at Haikudeck are absolutely PHENOMENAL at customer service. I'm not paid to say this! I've never met them! I have no investment in HD. But I can say that every single time I've run into any problem at all with the technology, I've received swift, personalized and very responsive attention. This is a JOY!Here's an example of one I created and use:"10 Body Language Tips": http://www.haikudeck.com/p/mKMXmEDi28

Were Martin Luther King statues erected by haters of gay marriage to symbolize their hatred of gay marriage?Are Martin Luther King statues symbolic rallying points for haters of gay marriage?The majority of the Confederate statues went up not immediately following the war but during two racially charged eras. One was the Jim Crow era when racial segregation was mandated. The second was during the civil rights movement during the sixties.The real story behind all those Confederate statuesThe image is from the report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that the article is based on: Whose Heritage: Public symbols of the Confederacy.An excerpt from Greg Huffman’s post on Facebook, “I am a child of the South.” (The full post is well worth reading.)Back then, a pamphlet was usually published when a [Confederate] statue was going to be erected. These often contained the pre-printed speech of the key note speaker and would be handed out at the dedication ceremony, or they would document the ceremony and speeches to be distributed later. The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill has archived a number of these pamphlets and they are available online. I read some of them this week, and a number of them are bone chilling.A famous and well known example, at the dedication of "Silent Sam" on the UNC campus, Julian Carr, a prominent businessman and the appointed dedication speaker, espoused the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race and credited Confederate veterans with returning the Anglo-Saxons to their rightful place of power after blacks gained some modicum of political power immediately after the war. He then recounted how, immediately after the war on the UNC campus, he had beaten a black woman with a horse whip after he decided that she had insulted a white woman. He bragged that the beating was in full view of garrisoned federal troops who took no action to stop him.At the dedication of a monument in Oxford, North Carolina in 1909, the keynote speaker, North Carolina's own governor, Governor William Kitchin, gave a particularly detailed tribute to the supremacy of the white race. He declared that whites and blacks would never be equal and that no army or constitution would ever make them so. He stated that the Ku Klux Klan was a necessity to keeping order and that whites had dominated every race they ever encountered and always would.You get the picture.These were people in control of business and government. They ran the state. They held the levers of police power, money, and the power to legislate. These were the leaders of white North Carolina.A lot these monuments were put up as a tribute, at least in part, to a defeated society that engaged in the enslavement and oppression of another race. If they have any true historical value today, it is as a dark window into the 40 and 50 years after the Civil War. They open to the past for us to see the racial views of powerful whites at the time and their continued oppression of blacks. The documented history behind the monuments, the documented speeches and eyewitness accounts prove that out.Were MLK statues erected in response to the gay marriage “threat” to heterosexual marriage? Were public officials speaking at the dedication of the statues, emphasizing how MLK represented the “tradition” of heterosexual marriage? Are they gathering spots for gay marriage protestors and hate groups?No? Then your analogy has no bearing.