THE DALLES, Oregon – On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is as big as two football fields, with twin cooling towers protruding four stories into the sky. The towers, looming like an information-age nuclear plant, mark the site of what may soon be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, helping to supply the ever-greater horsepower needed to process billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services. And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border – at the intersection of low-cost electricity and readily accessible data networking – is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead. Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are building giant data centers upstream in Washington State, 130 miles to the north. But Google is doing something radically different here. The very need for two cooling towers, each connected to a football field-sized data center, is evidence of its extraordinary ambition. As imposing as Google’s new Oregon data center is, when it opens it will only a piece of a worldwide computing system known as the Googleplex, which is tied together by strands of fiber optic cables. A similar computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. “Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it’s a hidden asset,” said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and the cofounder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex. The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles, or 130 kilometers, east of Portland, Oregon, has been a closely guarded corporate secret. Many local officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the Google data center project, referred to locally as Project 02, because they signed confidentiality agreements with the company last year. “No one says the ‘G’ word,” said Diane Sherwood, who, as executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Washington, directly across the river from The Dalles, is not bound by such agreements. “It’s a little bit like ‘He-Who- Must-Not-Be-Named’ in Harry Potter.” Local residents are at once enthusiastic and puzzled about their affluent but secretive new neighbor, a successor to the aluminum manufacturers who once came seeking the inexpensive power that flows readily from the dams holding back this powerful river. The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this year. “We’re trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and they’re trying to keep us all away,” said Susan Huntington, executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. “Our two cultures aren’t matching very well.” Culture clashes may be an inevitable byproduct of the urgency with which the search-engine war is being waged. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a vast variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce. Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion. Google is known to the world as a search engine, but in many ways it is foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers, using the latest academic research, that can process more data, faster and cheaper than its rivals. The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as astounding as its size. In March of 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web page views daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher who was given a detailed tour of one of the company’s Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000. Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread in at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and is building significant facilities in China and Russia. Connecting these centers is a high- capacity data network that the company has assembled over the past few years. Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users. Microsoft’s Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its most aggressive forecast, according to a company document. Computer scientists and computer networking experts caution that it is impossible to compare the two companies’ efforts directly. Yet it is the way in which Google has built its globally distributed network that illustrates the daunting task of its competitors in catching up. “Google is like the Borg,” said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990s online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on Star Trek that was assembled from millions of individual components. “I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google.” John Markoff reported from The Dalles and Saul Hansell from New York. Google Earth upgraded Google has released a major upgrade to its Google Earth software, which gives users a three-dimensional satellite view of the world, The Associated Press reported from Mountain View, California. The company said four times more land would be covered in the latest version of its free Google Earth software, enabling about one-third of the world’s population to obtain an aerial view of their homes and neighborhood. The software also is being offered in German, Spanish, French and Italian, and will work on computers using the Linux operating system for the first time. More than 100 million people have downloaded Google Earth software since it was offered a year ago, according to figures released by the company for the first time on Monday. Meanwhile, Google’s online mapping service for finding directions and locating businesses has emerged as a major challenger to the longtime leaders in the category, AOL’s Mapquest and Yahoo. Google Maps attracted 26 million U.S. visitors in May to rank third behind Mapquest at 43.5 million visitors and Yahoo at 26.1 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. THE DALLES, Oregon On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is as big as two football fields, with twin cooling towers protruding four stories into the sky. The towers, looming like an information-age nuclear plant, mark the site of what may soon be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, helping to supply the ever-greater horsepower needed to process billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services. And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border – at the intersection of low-cost electricity and readily accessible data networking – is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead. Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are building giant data centers upstream in Washington State, 130 miles to the north. But Google is doing something radically different here. The very need for two cooling towers, each connected to a football field-sized data center, is evidence of its extraordinary ambition. As imposing as Google’s new Oregon data center is, when it opens it will only a piece of a worldwide computing system known as the Googleplex, which is tied together by strands of fiber optic cables. A similar computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. “Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it’s a hidden asset,” said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and the cofounder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex. The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles, or 130 kilometers, east of Portland, Oregon, has been a closely guarded corporate secret. Many local officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the Google data center project, referred to locally as Project 02, because they signed confidentiality agreements with the company last year. “No one says the ‘G’ word,” said Diane Sherwood, who, as executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Washington, directly across the river from The Dalles, is not bound by such agreements. “It’s a little bit like ‘He-Who- Must-Not-Be-Named’ in Harry Potter.” Local residents are at once enthusiastic and puzzled about their affluent but secretive new neighbor, a successor to the aluminum manufacturers who once came seeking the inexpensive power that flows readily from the dams holding back this powerful river. The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this year. “We’re trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and they’re trying to keep us all away,” said Susan Huntington, executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. “Our two cultures aren’t matching very well.” Culture clashes may be an inevitable byproduct of the urgency with which the search-engine war is being waged. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a vast variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce. Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion. Google is known to the world as a search engine, but in many ways it is foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers, using the latest academic research, that can process more data, faster and cheaper than its rivals. The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as astounding as its size. In March of 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web page views daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher who was given a detailed tour of one of the company’s Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000. Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread in at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and is building significant facilities in China and Russia. Connecting these centers is a high- capacity data network that the company has assembled over the past few years. Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users. Microsoft’s Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its most aggressive forecast, according to a company document. Computer scientists and computer networking experts caution that it is impossible to compare the two companies’ efforts directly. Yet it is the way in which Google has built its globally distributed network that illustrates the daunting task of its competitors in catching up. “Google is like the Borg,” said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990s online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on Star Trek that was assembled from millions of individual components. “I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google.” John Markoff reported from The Dalles and Saul Hansell from New York. Google Earth upgraded Google has released a major upgrade to its Google Earth software, which gives users a three-dimensional satellite view of the world, The Associated Press reported from Mountain View, California. The company said four times more land would be covered in the latest version of its free Google Earth software, enabling about one-third of the world’s population to obtain an aerial view of their homes and neighborhood. The software also is being offered in German, Spanish, French and Italian, and will work on computers using the Linux operating system for the first time. More than 100 million people have downloaded Google Earth software since it was offered a year ago, according to figures released by the company for the first time on Monday. Meanwhile, Google’s online mapping service for finding directions and locating businesses has emerged as a major challenger to the longtime leaders in the category, AOL’s Mapquest and Yahoo. Google Maps attracted 26 million U.S. visitors in May to rank third behind Mapquest at 43.5 million visitors and Yahoo at 26.1 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.