How can Google be so fast?

Answer 1

They pretty much have a local copy of the internet cached on thousands of PC's on custom filesystems.

Answer 2

It's a bit too much to put it in one answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform

Answer 3

Everyone knows it's because they use pigeons, of course!

Oh yeah, that and Mapreduce.

Answer 4

Google hires the best of the best. Some of the smartest people in IT work at google. They have virtually infinite money to throw at hardware and engineers.

They use highly optimized storage mechanisms for the tasks that they are performing.

They have geographically located server farms.

Answer 5

This link it also very informative Behind the scenes of a google query

Answer 6

An additional reason appears to be that they cheat on the TCP slow start algorithm.

http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html