[skalpelis]

That was just the storage unit, check the image linked from the page - http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/... - all of those servers were doing the real work.

Of course, it is humbling to know that just 14 years later the average smartphone has that kind of power. (ok, well, probably not the average)

[mmaunder]

What's awesome is that they were working way smarter than any other small or big search cluster. Instead of just pounding out an inverted index of words to web pages, they were walking the web graph and creating ranking data that massively surpassed all other search engines in relevancy.

Back then AllTheWeb and Excite thought they had Search in the bag while that little cluster chugged quietly away.