this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
163 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37723 readers
61 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Idk… in theory they probably don’t need to store a full copy of the page for indexing, and could move to a more data-efficient format if they do. Also, not serving it means they don’t need to replicate the data to as many serving regions.
But I’m just speculating here. Don’t know how the indexing/crawling process works at Google’s scale.
Absolutely. The crawler is doing some rudimentary processing before it ever does any sort of data storage saving. That's the sort of thing that's being persisted behind the scenes, and it's almost certainly both not enough to reconstruct the web page, nor is it (realistically) human-friendly. I was going to say "readable" but it's probably some bullshit JSON or XML document full of nonsense no one wants to read.