Search Speed Question

Narz

keeping it real
Joined
Jun 1, 2002
Messages
31,514
Location
Haverhill, UK
So how come Google can search the entire Internets in .3 seconds but it takes stupid Windoze search dog 4 minutes to scan my computer's hard drive for some photo?

Thanks. :)
 
1 Google is searching 24/7 and making notes of the results.

2 Their hardware is just a bit better than yours.
 
So how come Google can search the entire Internets in .3 seconds but it takes stupid Windoze search dog 4 minutes to scan my computer's hard drive for some photo?

Thanks. :)

The files on your computer are different than the indexed files on the internet.
 
Google relies on their amazing search algorithm for a lot of the traffic for their ads. Microsoft could give two craps about how fast you can find stuff on your computer.
 
I dunno about Windows, but on my PC, locate is generally limited by the speed it can print to the console.
 
locate uses a database so it's searches are much faster. Windows Vista and 7 also use some sort of indexing so they're relatively fast, but afaik, XP uses a plain old sequential search.
 
locate uses a database so it's searches are much faster. Windows Vista and 7 also use some sort of indexing so they're relatively fast, but afaik, XP uses a plain old sequential search.

You can install Windows Search 4 on XP, it just has to be done manually through Windows/MS update.
 
Yeah google is searching all the web pages all the time and indexing them (I think it maintains a database of incidences of every 2 words appearing on every webpage).

That uses up a ton of storage space.
 
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