Most people still think of Web sites such as Google as places to
go. Wrong. That's the old media model. In reality, every click
is a command for some computer somewhere in the world. (...)
Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google essentially is a huge,
distributed supercomputer "doing all sorts of things over a
fiber-optic network that eventually are services available to
end-users." Before long, Googling will mean not just searching
for something, but getting ALMOST anything done online. The New
York Times estimated last year that the Googleplex and its
server farms contain 450,000 servers. "The rate at which the
Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size.
In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web
pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft
researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he
was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers.
By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000."