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Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company does not provide detailed information about its hardware, a 2006 estimate consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world (See Google platform for more details on their technology). According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most popular search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23%) and MSN (13%). However, independent estimates from popular sites indicate that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google, with Yahoo! a distant second and MSN occupying barely 5%. It receives about a billion search requests per day, which are recorded and stored indefinitely "to improve its search engines
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