Welcome to ByteByteGo Briefs. Today, we’re uncovering how Google stores trillions of web pages.

Every day, Google’s crawlers collect hundreds of billions of URLs, packing raw data into shipping containers full of hard drives. Once they arrive at Google’s data centers, this flood of information is ingested into Colossus, “Google’s global file system.” Colossus slices data into chunks, replicating each piece across multiple servers to guarantee high availability and durability.

To wrangle scale, Google runs massive MapReduce pipelines that compress and deduplicate petabytes of raw content—turning them into exabytes of optimized storage. Next, an inverted index is built, mapping every word to its documents. This index is sharded and distributed worldwide, allowing Google Search to “answer queries in under 200 milliseconds.”

With clever caching, prefetching, and layers of redundancy, Google serves over five billion searches a day. That’s the secret behind managing trillions of web pages—fast, resilient, and ever-expanding.
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