A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor - New York Times: "When Google was a graduate-school project being run from a Silicon Valley garage, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built their own computers out of cheap parts meant for personal computers. They wanted to save money, and they felt that they could design a network of computers that would search the Web more efficiently than those available from traditional manufacturers.
Google no longer needs to pinch pennies. It is a solid member of the Fortune 500 with $9 billion in cash. Still, it is stubbornly sticking to its do-it-yourself approach to technology. Even as it spends more than $1.5 billion this year on operations centers and technology, most of the hundreds of thousands of servers it will deploy are being custom-made based on Google's own eccentric designs."
