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US Government Upgrades RAM
Deep Throat writes "Techworld has the scoop on a new super-sized RAM disk that the US government has just bought for a few million dollars in order to speed up searching through huge databases. It's 2.5TB! The VP of the company that made it says it is for Washington DC and searching databases but won't say who. Techworld explains why it reckons it's the Department of Homeland Security searching in the NSA and Pentagon databases for terrorists. And apparently the government is 'very happy' with the purchase and thinking about getting more."
Actually no, Google crawls a vast amount of information but a very small percentage of that information is useful (specifically the links and keywords). Google also remebers common queries and plays other tricks to speed up searches. When your looking at a 2.5 TB database it is very different. First of all history doesn't matter as much since it is unlikly that they will be running multiple searches on the same thing. Second the 2.5TB is all meta data, so its all relivant, so it all must be searched. Third a query is likly to be much more complex then a normal google query. Google has one index that can be clearly defined in an alphabetic way. The govenment has many data bases that are indexed multiple different ways. This makes searching for connections between databases very difficult. In short Google is highly optimised for a specific type of search and probably will not work in the much fuzzier realm of inteligence.