Google patents map-reduce
January 19th, 2010 at 5:28 pm ETFor my search engine homies, via Dave Farber’s Interesting People list. Comments?
United States Patent 7,650,331
Dean, et al.
January 19, 2010
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System and method for efficient large-scale data processingAbstract
A large-scale data processing system and method includes one or more application-independent map modules configured to read input data and to apply at least one application-specific map operation to the input data to produce intermediate data values, wherein the map operation is automatically parallelized across multiple processors in the parallel processing environment. A plurality of intermediate data structures are used to store the intermediate data values. One or more application-independent reduce modules are configured to retrieve the intermediate data values and to apply at least one application-specific reduce operation to the intermediate data values to provide output data.
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Inventors: Dean; Jeffrey (Menlo Park, CA), Ghemawat; Sanjay (Mountain View, CA)
Assignee: Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA)
Appl. No.: 10/871,244
Filed: June 18, 2004
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
January 19th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rich Mintz, enachb. enachb said: Google patents MapReduce http://bit.ly/77Fvnf [...]
January 19th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
if google != Evil:
print “We will use this patent for defensive purposes only”
else:
raise Exception(“Uh oh”)
Quite amusing in light of the recent Google/China flap! I just hope this doesn’t impair Apache Hadoop (or those who depend on it) in any way.