While I personally believe Conde Nast should give up on trying to produce their new biz magazine, Portfolio (it is a train wreck of a design filled with clueless advertisers who think ‘metrosexuals’ are still a desirable category only to confuse those who actually attempt to read the train wreck of content as currently produced), there is at least some small sign of intelligent life behind some of their web efforts.

To whit:  a fine flash based overview of how Google actually works.  See it here.

No big surprises if you have any idea how rack farms work but still interesting to review for the average layman.

For example, check this graphic out (courtesy of Portfolio):

I presume that 20,000 machines are one cluster.  That’s 20k x 250 clusters = 5,000,000 machines working in conjunction as one hive mind.  Whoa.