These days, Google
Thanks to Google's willingness to reinvest huge chunks of its AdWords and AdSense billions, the company has both a colossal army of engineers and researchers to work on new products and technologies, and a data center infrastructure to host these inventions that's arguably second to none. And just as impressive as the scale of Google's investments is the quality of the people that much of this money is being invested in. Thanks to a combination of pay, perks, and culture, Big G has long been renowned for attracting the best and brightest.
Add it all up, and Google is one of a kind in the Internet world when it comes to unleashing and supporting a flood of innovative, resource-intensive new services. Google Maps is a good example of such a service – when it was first released, its dynamic interface ran circles around the static maps then provided by Yahoo! Maps and AOL's
And now, Google Instant can be added to the company's feats of technical wizardry. As Google engineer Ben Gomes explained on his blog, making Google's infrastructure Instant-ready required both a massive boost in system capacity to handle all the additional search results turned up by Instant relative to a conventional search, and some major innovations to guarantee that both Google's servers and a searcher's web browser would be able to quickly turn up new search results. Programming a VCR this wasn't.
Maybe in time, Microsoft's