> Sounds like it's running on surprisingly little hardware.
Modern computers (even ones from 2013) are really fast. I implemented PageRank from the original paper: I have about the same size of index as early Google, and what Page and Brin’s server could compute in a week with carefully optimized C code, mine can do in less than 5 minutes (!) with a bit of JavaScript.
> Is the index stored on a separate SSD?
No, it’s just on the same disk with the rest of the system. My experience has been that pretty much everything that Feep! search does is CPU-bound on this machine; in fact I suspect (though I haven’t tried it) that the index could even be on the HDD and the only difference would be a few extra milliseconds when serving search results.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense actually, thanks for explaining! The heuristics idea sounds neat.
Sounds like it's running on surprisingly little hardware. Is the index stored on a separate SSD?