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By doing all the calculation in memory. Disk is too slow

There's also flash, which is also pretty fast, and fits nicely between magnetic and RAM.

Here's a handy rule of thumb about relative costs: the cost of a byte on magnetic_disk:flash:ram is about 1:10:100. I.e. the cost increases 10x when you go to the next level.

Lots of servers and wires and things stored in RAM long before you ever ask for them basically

The article is not about how they come up with the results. Only about how they deliver the page.

The article compares the speed to other websites like nike.com which have nothing to do with a search engine.

This reminds me of that joke video about replacing MongoDB with /dev/null. Look at the write speeds! /dev/null is web scale!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs