My question is: Why and how can Google complete a search of thousands 
of computers worldwide in a fraction of a second, while it takes Windows 
45 - 60 seconds to find a simple text string in it's registry database.

Hi gr8audio,

The answer is:  indexing.  What Google does is like looking up a word
in a dictionary, while the Windows Registry search is like reading a
book from beginning to end to find a particular word.

A Google search does not involve direct interaction with thousands of
computers worldwide; a search query goes to Google's servers, where
software searches a huge database that indexes a lot of the content
available on the Internet.  Google has other systems that constantly
"crawl the web," gathering and maintaining the information that goes
into the index database.  The system is designed and optimized for
searching.

The Windows Registry is not designed for text retrieval.  It contains
data organized in a hierarchy of named keys.  If you know the key, it
can retrieve the associated data very quickly, but if you want to
search for a text string, there is no information available about
where it might be, so the software has to read every Registry entry
(from some starting point) and compare it to the target string in
order to find a string.  There could easily be thousands of Registry
entries to search.

Google also throws more hardware at the problem, thousands of
computers, but since they are serving millions of users, this is not a
significant factor compared to indexing.


Additional Links

An introduction to how Internet search engines work on the howstuffworks web site

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine1.htm

"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by the
founders of Google, 1998, outlines the search technology.

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

SearchEngineWatch reports that Google was doing 250 million searches
per day as of February 2003.

http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156461

This support page from the University of Victoria (British Columbia,
Canada) says a typical Windows 98 Registry will have over 80,000
values.

http://helpdesk.uvic.ca/how-to/support/win32/docs/reg_intro.html


Search Strategy

I supplemented knowledge I already had with some searching:

how google search works

google queries per day

windows registry text search


I hope this information is helpful.  If it's not clear enough or you
need more information, please ask for a clarification.

--efn

I think that Google Answers is by far the Internets most innovative
method for obtaining factual information. I have been lurking here for
months without asking a question and I just can't get enough. Thanks
to efn-ga for the answer and to geniusx-ga for the comment, both will
help me (and maybe others) understand more than just making hardware
and software work - and that's my two cents (uh..ten bucks)

Heres good page about how google works. 
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html 
Basically it has A bot that searches and crawls the net with their
very high speed connections and huge database.  Thats why everything
is cached; its all saved to their database for instint retreival.  As
to why your search is slow you might want to change some options.  Got
to your windows search, than click on change preferences, change file
and folder search behavior, advanced.  click more advanced options. 
On mine I have search system folders and search subfolders clicked. It
depends mostly on what you are looking for. You can also change the
file type for quicker searching.  Lastly in services --> run command
services.msc make sure indexing service is started and in your drive
properties at the bottom indexing service is turned on for that drive.
WINdows indexing service isnt as complex as googles because if you
wanted it that way it would take up alot more drive space to index
everything in a database.  It searches every single file in every
single folder and that takes alot of time