A simple and strait forward one would be PG's using LISP for his website generation software. It was an ideal language for manipulating structured text and let them run rings around the completion even if they had 5x the budget and tried to directly copy them. It was also the type of thing they kept quiet about, just listing the need to LISP programmers on there job pages and that's it.
Google's secret sauce included map reduce running on huge cheap server farms. They where not making financial decisions so if a machine took to long to respond they could skip it and still give you a fast response. They also built a highly redundant and salable infrastructure, but that they where willing to talk about.
Now, these where things that did not make the marketing copy, but where central to their ability to grow and adapt quickly and cheaply. It's also the type of incite that's shows up when you actually sit down and try to design a system and find out what the actual hard parts are and how to deal with them. AKA, what happens if we need to serve 10,000 requests a second now how about 100,000?
Google's secret sauce included map reduce running on huge cheap server farms. They where not making financial decisions so if a machine took to long to respond they could skip it and still give you a fast response. They also built a highly redundant and salable infrastructure, but that they where willing to talk about.
Now, these where things that did not make the marketing copy, but where central to their ability to grow and adapt quickly and cheaply. It's also the type of incite that's shows up when you actually sit down and try to design a system and find out what the actual hard parts are and how to deal with them. AKA, what happens if we need to serve 10,000 requests a second now how about 100,000?