Nearly 30 years ago, when Google launched the search engine that started its long march to dominance, its founders started without much hardware.

Known at first as Backrub and operated on the Stanford campus, the company’s first experimental server packed 40 gigabytes of data and was housed in a case made of Duplo blocks, the oversize version of Lego. Later, thanks to donations from IBM and Intel, the founders upgraded to a small server rack. In 2025, you can’t even fit Google search in a single data center, something that’s been true for a long time.

Still, with a little clever resourcing and a lot of work, you can get pretty close to a modern Google-esque experience using a machine roughly the size of that original Google server. You can even house it in your laundry room.

That’s wher

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