It's called System Design part of the interview. They want to understand your knowledge about software architecture in general and how you can be part of decision making if any new project starts. So, generally they don't want you to go through intricate details of the system, instead they want you to outline the basic components of a Google search server in your case. They might be interested in testing your knowledge about scalability, load balancing and other design related concepts. As far as scaling the app is concerned, they want you to go through how you structure a web app. They want to know how you will manage service, state management, UI components, presentational components in your web app and how your decisions can improve and scale web app to a greater extent.
being a front end developer, maybe we can talk about scalability for 10, 15 minutes... talking about it for an hour I think I'd probably run out of things to discuss
Don’t worry about that, you won’t be asked to do an hour long talk about it, it’ll probably be just a discussion and they’ll be the ones directing it. So just be prepare for it as much as you can and try not to overthink it. You won’t be giving a talk, you’ll be part of one.
I hope that's the case. Certainly if is a discussion only, it is not an issue. If they make an offer, it is even more so not an issue. I have interviewed with companies that pushed and pushed, and sounded like why I am not giving proper scalability design or infrastructure architecture and showing displeased facial expression, and then not extending any offer (note that it is a front end dev role), and when I made any feedback to the recruiting department, they'd say, "not every (hiring) system is perfect."
It's called System Design part of the interview. They want to understand your knowledge about software architecture in general and how you can be part of decision making if any new project starts. So, generally they don't want you to go through intricate details of the system, instead they want you to outline the basic components of a Google search server in your case. They might be interested in testing your knowledge about scalability, load balancing and other design related concepts. As far as scaling the app is concerned, they want you to go through how you structure a web app. They want to know how you will manage service, state management, UI components, presentational components in your web app and how your decisions can improve and scale web app to a greater extent.
being a front end developer, maybe we can talk about scalability for 10, 15 minutes... talking about it for an hour I think I'd probably run out of things to discuss
Don’t worry about that, you won’t be asked to do an hour long talk about it, it’ll probably be just a discussion and they’ll be the ones directing it. So just be prepare for it as much as you can and try not to overthink it. You won’t be giving a talk, you’ll be part of one.
I hope that's the case. Certainly if is a discussion only, it is not an issue. If they make an offer, it is even more so not an issue. I have interviewed with companies that pushed and pushed, and sounded like why I am not giving proper scalability design or infrastructure architecture and showing displeased facial expression, and then not extending any offer (note that it is a front end dev role), and when I made any feedback to the recruiting department, they'd say, "not every (hiring) system is perfect."
by the way, the "scaling the webapp" is a one hour interview session.