Markoff and Zachary on Google

John Markoff and Gregg Zachary, two of the leading lights of Silicon Valley technology journalism (and tech journalism generally) have a very interesting article on Google in the Sunday New York Times (registration required). Among the fun facts they unearth:

• The Google technical infrastructure "consists of more than 54,000 servers designed by Google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks... making it what many consider the largest computing system in the world." It turns out that this i snow a big competitive advantage for Google, as it moves from what analysts once dismissed as a commodity business (Web searching) into serving as an advertising platform as well. (Personally, I always ignore the ads, but apparently they work for some.)

• CEO Eric Schmidt stood out because he "was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man."