::sigh:: Would love to see this thing in detail and work on it. Frustrating that some of the most promising and interesting technologies in Google (e.g. BigTable) come out of there only in whitepaper or spec form. I can see several business advantage reasons for them to do so, but still... frustrating.
To be fair, a SIGMOD paper is much more detailed than a white paper. But perhaps you said that because the Google page only links to the presentation from the conference, not the paper itself. You can find that here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2213954
edit: oddly, it appears that the "full-text" pdf that the ACM has is just the abstract. So I can't get at the full paper, either. Sorry about that.
It's an industrial presentation. As such, there's no paper about it, just the talk given at SIGMOD and the slides. When Google unveiled Megastore, F1 predecessor, it did it as an industrial presentation too. Years, and many improvements later, they published a paper on Megastore.
I've not seen it, but I'd be willing to bet their search engine code is a mess.
The reason for this: almost all single purpose software is a complete disaster area. (And a massive proportion of other stuff isn't much better). As long as it works within certain parameters then there really is no need to fix it up.
except that Google's algorithms are being constantly tweaked and improved. Crap code is only left alone as is when it won't be touched anymore. If the code being crap makes your day to day hard, the best bet would be to refactor (given that you have the money and time, which Google has).
