Google and its data centres.

Google and its data centres.

By Clare Lawrence 2nd January 2004

Ever wondered how Google manages its 3 billion plus index? In this article I explain how big G is organised.

Google uses data centres, these spread the workload between more than 10,000 computers.

How Many Google data centers are there? As of 2nd January 2004, there are 13 data centres, these are located across the globe. More are added from time to time.

Domain IP Address
www-mc.google.com 66.102.7.100
www-lm.google.com 66.102.9.100
www-kr.google.com 66.102.11.100
www-ex.google.com 216.239.33.100
www-sj.google.com 216.239.35.100
www-va.google.com 216.239.37.100
www-dc.google.com 216.239.39.100
www-fi.google.com 216.239.41.100
www-ab.google.com 216.239.51.100
www-in.google.com 216.239.53.100
www-zu.google.com 216.239.55.100
www-cw.google.com 216.239.57.100
www-gv.google.com 216.239.59.100

Google crawls sites continually, then periodically it updates the data centres with a "fresh index", due to the sheer size of data involved, this can't happen instantly so result around the time of re-index appear to jump around.

Each time you browse google you receive data from one of the data centres, this is often the closest geographically, but depends on traffic etc.

Interested to see your results on a different data centre? Copy one of the URL's above into your browser. If the results are different on any of the centres a re-index is in progress.

Google also has two test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com, these are used to try out new search algorithms, so if your interested to see what might be your results in the future, try seaching on these, bear in mind that not all the experimental algorithms Google develops become part of the main one.