*kinda
I can imagine that if I’m searching for “ball” Google already has the PageRank sorted results somewhere on its servers. That seems easy enough. But what about arbitrary search terms? Searching for “tango durlast 1978” (a soccer ball) gives me results just as fast, does Google have all of that pre-computed somewhere?
If they did that (to pick an arbitrary number) for search terms up to 100 characters (say all 26 letters, ten digits and space) that would mean that they would have to have something like 37^100=6.6e+156 pre-computed lists of results somewhere on their servers.
That can’t be what they are doing. If they were to use only one byte per possible search term (to pick another arbitrary and completely ridiculous number) they would still need to store 6.6e+144 terabyte. Which seems kinda impossible.
2) You have to update your copy of the internet regularly.
3) You don't want to search all that whenever somebody types a few words. So write programs to regularly prepare indexes in advance (just like in the books) and then when the query with words comes you can "just" look up in these.
The steps above sound simple, but you can imagine that the devil is in details, that there's a lot of knowhow needed and a lot of money to do that really right. Just ask Microsoft or even some failed search company.
First think of the web as a big matrix with each row being a document and each column being a term. The first step is to decide how you want to shard this matrix across multiple machines.
You can shard by row, which lets you do really complicated scoring, but you have to hit every machine for every query.
You can shard by column, which is much cheaper, but limits how sophisticated your scoring can be.
Within each machine the problems are all probably fairly familiar.
Of course, storing millions of the "common queries" isn't a joke either and that still doesn't answer the question of how they search the internet within a few seconds anyhow; I'm not trying to give a complete answer, just point one aspect out. Google Instant, by design, provides the Google Suggest queries the vast bulk of the time and I guaranteed that those are either largely or possibly even entirely pre-cached, so you're not doing 10 web searches in two seconds, you're doing 10 hash lookups in 2 seconds. Which is still damned impressive, I can't hardly keep my web site loading in less than two seconds for one hit where I work.
Even if 30% of queries are truly unique (a number that people have quoted from years ago, may no longer be true) caching 70% of the queries is a big win. Also, instant search is heavily relying on Google Suggest, which by it's very nature, are queries which have been performed already, so are trivially cacheable.
It's a great example of using the UI to encourage a desired behavior.
Google can't cache nearly as much as you would expect, not because the queries change, but because the results change.
The tough part for Bing, is with fewer searches, their predictive engine isn't quite as good. But this is where the Yahoo deal will pay off.
But all they need to do is fire off predictive searches and bring those back -- and of course, each predictive search only needs to bring back ten or fewer results.
Bing already does the predictive text suggestion. They just need to send back queries along with the actual text suggestion. At worst they'd need to get some more servers. But I fully expect they'd be able to roll this out in months if they wanted to.
Although personally I'd still focus on relevance. There's so much stuff both engines suck at, I'd love for them to fix some of those holes first.