The Coming Search Wars: "As a result, Google now has an immense number of users, with 200 million searches on an average day. That gives it a great advantage over its competitors, which are now trying to catch up.
'The system that has the most users benefits the most,' said Nancy Blachman, a computer scientist and author of an independent guide to using Google (www.googleguide.com). 'Microsoft faces a tremendous challenge because Google fine-tunes its system by watching how users adjust their queries.'"

To help their work, Google has been quietly developing what industry experts consider to be the world's largest computing facility. Last spring, Google had more than 50,000 computers distributed in over a dozen computer centers around the world. The number topped 100,000 by Thanksgiving, according to a person who has detailed knowledge of the Google computing data center. The company is placing a significant bet that Microsoft will be hard pressed to match its response time to the ever increasing torrent of search requests