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300 Years to Index the World's Information
Kasracer writes "At the Association of National Advertisers annual conference, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt suggested that it would take 300 years for them to index all of the world's information. From the article: 'We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years,' Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. 'The answer is it's going to be a very long time.'"
I always thought 42 years ought to be enough.
Does that estimate include how much pocket lint I have?
Seriously, though, why would anyone want to index all the info in the world? That's kinda weird, in my opinion.
Would this include indexing the Ultimate Question? Because last time I checked, that would take 10,000,000 years in and of itself.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
they just say stuff to stay on the front page of the news. If MS did this kind of thing you anti-ms people would be screaming bloddy murder.
We did a math exercise and the answer was 300
Really? I thought the answer was 42?
The hardest part will be developing the hardware that is able to recursively index the Google data itself an infinite number of times.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Did they take into account the information that is being created as they are indexing? Do they plan on live indexing everything that's being made. Information doesn't stop getting created just because they've stored everything that's already been done.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Then you have to index the index, which may very well cause the whole universe to break down.
..only 150 years to do it next year.
300 years? I'd have thought their other plan would have been a lot quicker.
But the mere fact that you're indexing information and the way you're indexing it, that's information. So when does one stop?
I'm indexing data.
I'm indexing how I'm indexing data;
I'm indexinf how I'm indexing how I'm...
How long until Google decides that your house is information? Just imagine an army of small robot spiders invading your home every night, registering the position, name and contents of every single object you own, making it searchable from house.google.com. Unless you nail a robots.txt to your front door, that is...
*holds envelope to his head*
"42"
*opens envelope and reads*
"What is the number of duplicate posts that will say 'I thought it was 42'."
Surely if they index everything they will have to index their own indexing, then index that indexing ad infinitum, starting a destructive information vortex wiping out the entirety of civilisation?
i hereby propose a new measurement for time: the google year
as we can measure disk space in libraries of congress,
and measure distance in light years...
a google year will be thus: the 300 year span it will take google to morph from geek-friendly search engine to big brother overlord who knows more about you than you do yourself
for example: it has been (2005-1492)/300 = 1.71 google years since columbus first set foot in america
and it will be 1 - (2005-1998)/300 = 0.9767 google years until your great-great-great-great-great-grandchilren will be nothing more than information slaves to the great google dominion
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I had it pegged at the year 2330. Not too far off.
Let's just hope google doesn't destroy the universe when it's done collecting all of it's information like the giant brains.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Please stop creating new information and let Google catch up! You can resume later.
It's going to take them a hell of a lot longer than that, considering my car keys are always moving.
Googlesphere anyone?
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
I wonder how many man-years it would take to listen to all the music and video that could be indexed. Be interesting at least to find out what the order of magnitute would be - millions, or perhaps billions or trillions of man-years of unique recorded audio and video? It would have to be a game of gross estimation - but it would at least put into perspective how much material is out there, even if most of it is boring "security" footage, compared to the scope of our lives.
It'd be interesting, if, perhaps in a couple generations, we could have a cheap media volume that contained "recorded media, prehistory - to - 2050ad"... if the media that exists today even survives a couple generations, and copyrights aren't extended indefinetly. The idea of an indexing system that can even put all that information into a meaningful context would be fascinating to consider though, if it could be possible.
Ryan Fenton
The comment was obviously made tongue-in-cheek. You readers need to start reading things critically and asking if it even makes sense.
How is 'information' defined in this context? Is a thirteen-year-old girl's blog considered information?
Near the bottom of the article they list a few assumptions made in the math exercise the Google conducted. Among other things they assumed that computer power will half every 18 months and that computers 30 years from now will be so large that they will fill an entire room.
Hmm...so he's assuming the U.S. government will let 1923 copyrights expire some time before 2305 AD? Or has Google, after emasculating Google Print in response to lawsuits, suddenly found a new legal strategy?
Find free books.
Obviously they're not feeding those pigeons enough. Time to buy some quality feeds Google. Maybe even slip in some uppers every now and then. If all else fails, maybe it's time to consider the parrot upgrade. They're a lot more expensive but their index/poop ratio is much better.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I'd like to see their definition of information. Certainly, a lot of things that are already of common interest are on the net. Occasionally, I find things that aren't available online but the greatest majority of the time google is able to find what I want.
To further the example: at work we have several filing cabinets that haven't been opened in years. There are lots of papers and stuff in there, I can vouch for that. Some might consider it "information." But in reality all that stuff could be burned and I doubt it would make the slightest difference in the way the future rolls out. None of it is stuff that would ever be needed by an IRS audit or anything like that either. Does google consider this kind of stuff as part of their efforts? Because I think they can safely ignore it.
It's going to take 300 years to index the grammer and spelling mistakes on Slashdot alone.
Google really has no idea what it is talking about. There are too many variables to take into account, and they have no idea what the future will bring. Going back 30 years to 1974, look at the predictions made then. How many came true? Did any come true at all? Specific to the Google situation, it is easy to think of a few things that could throw the 30 year prediction into the wind: proliferation (increase) of privacy/DMCA/related acts, removal of such restrictions, computer speed improvements.
I don't think they'll ever get there. I would argue that the exponential increase of information and Google's indexing are both paced by Moore's law. As Google's indexing ability increases, the amount of information created will also increase, at least as fast, and probably faster. Unless you believe (and, who knows, the Googlites might, and that may be where the 300 years comes from) that Google will expand to fill the human universe, then Google will be able to keep up, never really get ahead.
No, the proper model is not Moore's law but Bono's law. If it takes 300 years now, then it'll take 320 years in 20 years, and most of the time will be spent waiting for exclusive rights to expire (if they ever do). For instance, indexing a literary work that's out of print and not widely available at libraries requires getting a new copy, and those aren't available until the copyright runs out.
We did a math exercise? What exercise?
To estimate the time involved, you surely need to know the size of the information involved (don't quote me that bunkum about 170 terabytes in TFA - yes I did read it), and to know the size you need to know what all the information is, which you can't (and surely new information is created all the time?).
This translates as "I pulled my finger out my ass, waved it in the air and came up with 300 years."
In all technicallity there's always new information, so it would take infinately long to index an infinite amount of information asuming that it takes a finite amount of time to index a unit of information. Although, I supose if they wait until it takes an infinitly small amount of time to index a unit of information then it would be possible in a finite amount of time. I never understood why Achilles didn't just shoot an arrow at the damn turtle anyway. Oh wait...
If you just took anything I said seriously, read it again.
Can someone call Google and ask them to hurry up indexing the world's information, specifically, my bedroom. I need my socks...
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world... the vast majority of it can probably be labeled worthless. Focusing on some of the world's great libraries should accomplish the task of disseminating 95 percent of what people want to know and dispense with more than a few terabytes of bunkem.
Kind of proves that the google index is not complete, doesnt it? Yet they claim they have the entire web indexed when you search?
300 years to index all the info extant *today*?
So how much more information will exist by then? Is it growing faster than Google can index it? Think about how fast that much information came into being in the first place.
What a silly question.
As we go into the future will the time to index
1) Take longer because more info is created faster then the ability to index it?
2) Take less time because processors, storage, and databases get faster?
3) Take the same amount of time because data and and the ability to index it grow at the same rate?
on how long it will take. For some reason I am reminded of the SCO case. One of the longstanding arguments is about how long it will take to examine all the code that IBM has produced in discovery. The estimates range from extremely long to not very long at all.
I suspect that it very much depends on how you do it. In the SCO/IBM case, some experts have done convincing analysis that didn't take very long at all. I suspect that what is lacking here is a very clever algorithm (and, no, I'm not going to suggest one).
Of course, not all info is in the web, nor all info in the web is accessable by search engines, and even not all info accesable by search engines can be searched (think in graphics with text, i.e. just scanned books, or flash presentations with the actual content), but still that number looks like a bit too much for me.
Google Millenium.
Being funny is my sig nature.
How much of that would be Slashdot's news about Google's every move? I guess around 10 years.
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Ask me about my sig.
One minor detail, though. If it will take 300 years to index knowledge currently present, then what of knowledge to be produced in the next 300 years? I mean, not even everything from the year 2004 has been indexed yet. Knowledge is infinite, therefore cannot be completely indexed--it would be best for us to interpret the "300 years" quote as a sort of geeky joke.
All it was was a cheap joke made off the cuff...Mr. Schmidt is laughing at all of you right now. This is NOT news.
This too shall pass.
The point is that many current systems spew a huge volume of low value (but nonzero value) data (multiple MB or GB/day/device). The lack of storage means most of this is not captured and is thus never indexed.
Even massive companies can't keep all their data. Wal-Mart stores on the order of 460 TB in their data warehouse, but only has room for the last 13 months of data or so. At 138 million customers per week, they only have room for a paltry 59kB per customer per week.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Then:
I tried to find the graph of speed over time because I have seen itseveral times. It shows the exponential increase in the speed of the project. Apparently there are many scientists that believe with techniques as they are now we could repeat the project in 2 years if we started over. The indexing of information could have a very similar timeline. Very slowly at first and then as technology and specific methodology develop off you go. So the truth is... this is a guess. I wouldn't put too much faith in it.
Does that 300 years timeframe include the destrucion phase outlined in this article...
Or is this actually a "Duke Nukem Forever" type of timeframe???
I estimate the destruction of the earth to be within 300 years, so Google better hurry it up! From there, someone's gotta cram all the information on a flash drive and get the hell off this planet! Mars?
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
in libraries of congress per terasecond?
I expect old Harry Seldon to appear before they get it all indexed.
I think they forgot to carry the one, that makes the real time required to be a mere 3000 years... :)
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
"We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years," Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. "The answer is it's going to be a very long time."
Since this was in response to an audience member's question, does anyone else think he was joking? Because it is such an outlandish question from an information theory and modeling point of view, perhaps he was mocking it? "Ah yes, we just came up with an equation and it should take 294.59 years." I think this also makes sense in light of his next comment, which was made on a more serious note. I interpret it, "We really didn't use an equation, it will obviously take a long time though." This is how I understod his comments, and I may be wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me if some reporter picked up on this "joke" and put it up as "news".
The spins of all the electrons in the universe to store the spins of all the electrons in the universe...
Only 300 years?!
Obviously, he doesn't know khow much pr0n is out there.
I hardly believe it'll take 300 years to index all the world's information, take the distributed computing project i'm with at the moment. They're hoping to use distributed computing to index every webpage, which when you look at when United Devices started their cancer research project they managed to do millions of hours worth of work without it taking millions of years ;)
Take a look at http://www.majestic12.co.uk/ and see what I mean. They haven't got it indexing yet, but they're getting there!
That totally fucking makes sense because everyone knows that the amount of knowledge we have STAYS THE SAME.
Who comes up with this shit science?
I guess this Internet thing is getting big
Devise, Repair, Solve, Build
Just for all the blogs
Really, is indexing the way to go. Basically indexing the world's information is basically applying government (i.e. classify and index) to the universe, which IMO is a waste of time. Life isn't just a index--there's got to be a better way.
I'm certain that 100 years ago mapping the stars was an insane concept. Today, we're able to do it to a more greater extent than we were even able to conceive 100 years ago.
:/
Admittedly the number of stars have not changed, but the distance we are able to see has. This means that there are a lot more stars to map now than there was 100 years ago...
Where am I going with this? The stars to astronomers, as information is to Google, have become increasingly complex over time but so has our ability to sort them out.
I can only assume that over the next 50 or even 100 years we will have developed new methods of sorting data. Once upon a time, the Dewey decimal system was "da bomb." Now, a SQL database would be able to dig through that information in about two seconds instead of a minute or two (although it may be much less in some cases).
So it may be a heck of a lot less than 300 years as time goes by. I just hope we DON'T stand still technologically.
Slant
Between the Spaces
The software they've designed to do the indexing will only run on Longhorn.
I just gzip my Inbox and send it to myself every month.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
How can Google stay in the news?
How can we persuade people that Google will still be around with work to do in 3-5 years time?
How can we persuade people that Google stocks are good for the forseable future?
Pseudoscience, 'complex' statistical analysis, oh - and one stooge in the audience...PR's finest toolset.
I keep having people asking me questions about computers that indicate they don't understand the reality involved. For example, they say something like, "Do you put your own programs in there?", with no idea about writing programs, starting with a program somebody else wrote and modifying it, or simply downloading a program.
What about how much space it will take up? By that time, data storage and compression will have advanced to the point where the entire google index fits on a single USB 4.0 nano-flash device.
Also, by then google will have so many indexes they'll need an index of google indexes. You'll go to googledex to find out which google to search on.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
question is asked, and they seem to miss that the answer is that it is it's own index.
Random Conversation
Q: What is your favorite color, you said it was orange?
A: I changed my mind, now its clear.
Also, can someone explain to me how you even approach something like this from a mathematical model point of view? How did the 170 terrabyte number even come up? Aren't there different definitions for what constitutes 'information?' Also, who the hell spent their 20% on this problem when there was integral code for vital programs to write, such as Google Suggest and Google Suggest in Japanese?
PLEASE, SOMEONE EXPLAIN BEFORE I GO OFF INTO MORE OF A FLAMEBAIT RANT!
Martini Glasses
Isn't everything information? Every single bit (i.e. piece) of every single thing contains information (just like the Matrix). So what precision is this 300-year estimate set at? If we have infinitely-small precision, we have infinite amount of information, which is simply infeasible to catalogue.
-Palal
With the development of nanotech-based computers, that time will be cut to probably less than fifty.
The real problem of course is getting access to the stuff that isn't digital already. Still, nanotech will probably enable more effective scanners in the next fifty years as well. Rather than using once or twice removed stuff like lasers and IR beams, mechanical scanners will actually crawl the object to be scanned - meaning that anything will be scannable, including three-dimensional objects eventually.
Waste of time to make predictions about the future when you don't know what technology is feasible and what isn't.
Of course, CEOs - even those like this guy - haven't a clue about areas outside their specific field.
Making statements like his is just stupid.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
With the current state of "IP" law, it will be illegal to index any new information anyways. So, once the corporation that owns it decides to delete it, it won't count.
Stuff like this (or years ago for LHC) is most likely following approach:
They astimated an amount of information that is "all information", like 480 000 Exabyte or so.
Then they look at their current capactity (storage and database cpupower) and just interpolate moore's law into the future and look when the demand will be met.
Of course, for stuff like the LHC that only interpolates 10-20 years into the future such a thing is possible, but 300 years? He should read up about the singularity...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed, he (Schmidt) said earlier during his speech."
So ... how many terrabytes of info will be produced in the next 300 years, and does anyone really think that Google (and anyone, or everyone) could keep up?
Especially, once all 20 billion people who live in the Solar System are video-documenting every moment of their existence ...
OK, so I project and exaggerate ...
They do have patents:
http://atomchip.com/_wsn/page2.html
Throw the numbers there into:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm
The EU site is below:
http://www.european-patent-office.org/
Which lead me to here:
http://www.espacenet.com/getstarted/index.en.htm
Which is where I stop before submitting this message to slashdot.
The article gives us no facts that we can use to verify the claim. Without a definition of information and a definition of indexing one cannot take this for accurate. There are many definitions of information and except that used in "Information Theory", which is a message received and decoded to its original form, I don't know of any definition that has sientific or mathematical rigour. In fact, in my opinion, Information Theory is a misnomer and is more properly called Communication Theory since it is about getting a message properly communicated, NOT about whether its contents are useful. Additionally, information as understood by most comes in many forms and types and each may require different ways of indexing. Finally, aren't the indexes information that needs to be indexed? How do you keep from recursing?
he's making the classic mistake of assuming progress is linear. we've seen time and time and time and time and time again that progress is exponential (or better.)
human genome project?
Moore's law?
K.
In 300 years:
google: the answer is 42
people: the answer to what?
google: hmmm... sorry, can't remember!
Uh oh...someone needs to visit Applied Cryogenics and knock 700 years off Fry's timer then.
170 TB is nothing! Is it really not more? 170 TB can be saved by you locally if you really want. Well, let me explain:
For 100$, you can get 250 DVD-Rs if you look hard. This is about 1 Terabyte. 170 TB = $17'000. The web can be yours for a tiny weeny little amount of money if you think about it. Isn't that incredible that the storage industry keeps making those medias cheaper and cheaper and us humans can't create new media fast enough? Wow, I'm baffled.
What resolution of data will you index? Suppose that satelite imagery improves, and we can resolve to the nearest centimeter. Does it make sense to index the positions of each of the dandelions on my lawn?
Robot Exclusion Protocol courtesy of ftrain.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Eric is talking taking into consideration GOOGs technology. Tomorrow scientists from Berkeley might announce that they have come up with a new technology and can index the world's info in 3 years. GOOG will be history.
Cheers!
Lets not forget the estimated century geneticist predicted it would take to decipher the human genome. It took less than a decade... If anything should be obvious at this point, making predictions based on current trends in technology is futile at best. I think I'll mail google a copy of 'The Singularity is Near' to celebrate their 9th birthday.
As proved by Goedel. QED.
This is your psudo-mod-bitchslap-sarcastic reply right here.
--Anonymize me up Scotty!--
Beavers mate for life
11>4
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Now the Infosphere will open it's protective crust so as to scan itself, completing it's 300 year task.
Ask a stupid question...
Proverbs 21:19
300 years, huh? That reminds me of a story I heard about how Michigan's trees all got chopped down. It seeems people did a study and determined that it would take about three hundred years to log all of Michigan's forests. Since the oldest trees in our state are only about three hundred years old, by the time they got done clearing the upper peninsula, the trees in the south would be as large as they were when logging began. So away they went.
Then came along an early technological innovation: the two-man saw. Trees could be cut down much faster than with axes. They then proceeded to chop everything down in a rather shorter timespan, and only about eighty or so acres of three hundred year old tree are left.
Isn't Google full of super-geniuses or something? Who do all sorts of clever things with computers? Something tells me somebody there already has this figured out.
just to digitize the card catalog at the library of congress?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
As in the ancient libraries as that of Alexander, or if Google becomes our Oracle of Delphi, all of our world's accumulated knowledge is stored in modern media and some calamity prevents our updating or refreshing of that huge data bank for a several generations or so?
It would be nice to think that after going to the great trouble of accumulating such a vast store of knowledge, it would be backed up in ways not so vulnerable to degradation with time. Is there a medium that can contain such a vast amount of data but is not badly degraded after a century or two?
If Google accomplishes this task, I hope they do the next step, and archive it in some manner where it can be totally readable to those a hundred years in the future with a recovering technology.
The amount of information to index is proportional to the number of humans alive. Since humans reproduce exponentially, the problem becomes exponential.
Yahoo should take the smart way and use von Neumann machines to complete the job.
Come to think of it, they're already employing several hundred von Neumann machines right now. They just need to uhh... "put them to work", if you will? The only caveat is that the resulting von Neumann machines can't be allowed to create any information to index, otherwise the whole advantage will be lost.
The up-side to this solution is that once the world's information is finished being indexed, there will be a generous surplus of donor organs and blood......and brrraaainns.
It was supposed to take a similar order of time to sequence the human genome. To the joy of scientists (and the dismay of life-long government grant winners), Celera did it in just a few years.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Why not just have every computer index itself. You could then have everything on the internet indexed in days.
Print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced 5 exabytes of new information in 2002 according to these Berkeley researchers. They have been estimating the amount of information created each year and how much it is growing.
Google probably used their figures. Factor in the speed of Google's spiders and the current rate of their growth - and I am sure 300 years is very close to the answer they found with their "math exercise."
Practice has shown that government ownership and operation of airports is inferior to private ownership.
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He didn't clarify that 299 years of that was indexing all the Internet porn sites.
Don't worry, I just ordered a pizza for I. C. Wiener.
My other car is first.
After 2008, Google-As-God will no longer worry your minds. Under my power, they will be but tiny figments of your imagination. Googlers will submit to me and kneel. As will you. So vote for me: http://zod2008.com/
Well, pigeons is an improvement over snakes. On the other hand, as a camel devotee, I think your parrot idea has much to commend it ...
What was the original estimation on the Human genome project?
10 years?
Blah! Don't believe the hype.
They'll have some music to accompany them.
Look, the problem is not how much data there is in the world, the problem is finding a general automatable algorithm for organizing it in such a way that J. Random User can rapidly find what he's looking for.
Stroll on down to the nearest university library. It's got a lot less information in it that Google is considering, and aboutt a hundred thousand man-years over a few centuries have gone into finding clever ways to organize it all: card catalogs, shelving systems (e.g. Dewey and his decimals), nowadays searchable electronic catalogs, reference books, specialized indices for law and science and medicine, citation indices, reviews, reviews of reviews...and so on and so forth forever. And yet, it can still be immensely difficult to track down a particular piece of information you want. Even if it can be done, often it takes a fair amount of expertise in a field just to know where to look. Where do you find public information on patents for desalination processes? How do you find out if anyone has synthesized a polymer resin that melts between 130 C and 150 C and is resistant to acid, with a tensile strength about X? What was the common law meaning of "ownership in fee simple" in 1680s England? Even to start looking for the answers, you often need great experience in the relevant field, so you know where to start looking -- the "search terms" we might say.
Google may be feeling its oats because they can now very rapidly provide the most obvious things people want -- directions to San Diego from Ukiah, the times and places Serenity is playing on Sunday, the lead story of the New York Times "Style" section last Sunday, or the names and addresses of the six pizzerias closest to me still open at 11:25 PM.
But this is utterly small potatoes compared to the problem of organizing information generally, so that it is useful to professionals during the weekday as well as for amusement on the weekend. It is first, generally speaking, an unsolved problem -- no library or information index I've ever used fails to have at least one frustrating "feature" that leaves me scratching my head, wondering what the heck the designers were thinking. Secondly, I very much doubt Google has the depth of professional expertise in-house to even begin to figure out how to organize all the giant repositories of information in law, science, engineering, literature et cetera in such a way that professionals can use them, let alone amateurs.
And finally, they don't have the money to do it, and it will be very hard for them to raise it. Indices have suffered from this problem for a long time: any given user will only pay a very small price per search, but it costs a huge amount to make the index. Heretofore, makers of indices and dictionaries and references have relied on selling them at very high prices to libraries, which in turn raise the money in small bits from their patrons, or taxes. But Google would cut out the library middleman -- you search directly. So how are they going to cover their costs? They've no easy way to charge you $0.005 every time you do a Google search, for example.
In short, this sounds like the 21st century equivalent of that 1950s nuclear energy braggadocio, "energy too cheap to meter." Call it "information too cheap to meter." Color me skeptical.
But without the poop, where will they get the materials for their page background???
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
As an earlier poster said, this might be a joke, and probably is considering who's mouth it came out of. There are serious issues with this. First, what is considered information? You could consider the approximate location of every molecule in the universe a piece of information. Perhaps just text could be considered - that would narrow down the field of information into the finite. But Google does mapping, so they already have broken out of just text. Then you have the fact that the amount of information (whatever that means) supposedly grows at a geometric or exponential rate (I don't remember which), and I'm sure a google spider won't be there waiting for every new bit of information to be generated. Giving an answer to how long it will take to index all information is almost like saying "How much does purple weigh?"
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Welcome our new(?) indexing overlords..
You can get it fast, you can get it good, You can get it cheap. Pick two!
thus begins the thousand year reign of the third reich !!!!! be scurrd!!!!
... once Google has completed its 300 year mission, it will reduce the Empire's fall to barbarism from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000 years.
but will they own it too? AS I'm sure if Erik is planning World Domination, he'd be long ded by then!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
What I want to know is... How long will it take to search the whole world's information?
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Google are harvesters of everything from geographical to academic info - what I'm suggesting is that the *.google idea be broken down into the */*/*/.google. Hell, you might even be able to subscribe to data which is published as pointless/statements/indexing/future/google and one day get back this page! That said, if I were a clever indexing bot of the future, I would advise myself not to index this particular post.
Perhaps Google and its cache are really the start of Megadodo ( google -> first-person -> megoogle -><dyslexia> -> megooddle -> <illiteracy> -> megadodo )Publications, one of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor Google-Beta and its Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. All wrapped in pretty e-ink digital paper. Has there ever been a better example of pruning redundent data in the whole history of the world than:
"Did you mean Ear wigs?
Search Results:
1 - Earth - Mostly Harmless"
Don't be so sure. Let's see. Google teams up with Nasa. Google involved in searching human-genome. I'm sure that the Google Research Centre also has a spin on Mind Transferance. 300 Years? That's nothing in the lifetime of a sentient google-bot.
Of all the companies that were around in 1705, how many are still in business today? Does anyone know? Off the top of my head I can't think of any. Think of how much the world has changed since 1705, will google even be relevant 300 years from now?
300 years later We will have information of 300 years ago
Ancient Greek Philosophers -18c Enlightenment Thinkers -Slashdotters
1. Recognize they will NEVER index even all significant information in the world today, because a) info growing too fast and b) we are not yet at the point that everyone is using networked data for everything.
2. Data can only be indexed as it is produced, otherwise you are fighting a losing battle with diminishing returns. It looks like 300 but it is really asymptotic approaching "when the universe cools down and we live in a big black hole".
3. Google spends money to increase recognition among public and government of the need to archive for posterity and scientific/cultural advancement. This includes legal basis for the indiscriminate archiving for society's greater good and a waveform collapse of all copyright owners' Terms of Usage and various nasty legal mechanisms mostly created by the U.S. (but did you know copyright is a criminal violation in Japan?). The money is needed to lobby other governments too, so that they increase networking and slow down copyright legislation (otherwise the U.S. government and its corporate backers will tend to continue to push foreign data laws down the throats of relatively undeveloped countries). Actually 1 billion dollars is only the beginning of what it will cost but Google is going to have to act to ensure its future.
4. Develop a tree of archival nodes (indexing all information streaming through them) from devices to communities to states. The forerunner of this will be simpler, smaller, cheaper google servers placed in music, radio, tv, print and other publishers, subsidized mainly by google, for the triple purpose of providing searchability to the companies, securing a future resource for Google to search and distribute when the copyright runs out, and creating a secure data store linked to a payment mechanism to realize on-demand sales for those companies with little sweat. Using Google will ensure low middleman charges since Google needs this stuff. Publishers will jump to offer Google rights 50 years later plus a small margin on online sales until then, in return for storing, indexing and selling now.
5. With the exception of data prior to this point, the index is done when networked data in our lives hits 100%.
6. We can approach 100% a bit faster by reducing duplication, but we will end up with massively higher storage requirements as we find new definitions of important information, such as securely storing genetic data assays every year per individual for health purposes, or storage of information on preferences concerning the just in time construction of micro- or nanoscale robots.
So how long does this take? Google has started selling servers already. They will do a heroic job until we hit the network singularity (everything we do is all together on the one net, indexed as it is produced by intelligent agents). Seems likely the network singularity and a minimal form of artificial intelligence will coincide. This says the task will be done in maybe 50 years (well between 30 and 100), and not 300.
The rest of the 300 years can be spent cross-correlating all of mankind's knowledge; actually the beginning of this is starting now but when say in the next 10-30 years actually make headway in the semantic web so that we get a yahoo-like index of all scientific and business knowledge, we will stop duplicating information, and education and business will get more efficient. It will accelerate as we learn more about ourselves and advances in computing will just barely keep up with indexing and crosscorrelating it all as we start eating up CPU cycles for things other than video games and imaginary friends. My guess is 100 years. So Google has no business talking about 300 years concerning anything except maybe plans for space travel. Their online world is going to change way too much by then! Figure that (if it is economically important) 80% of the people on the planet will have the same capabilities as Google does now in 20 years. They will only have to worry about 300 years if they keep evolving their goals higher and higher.
Is it like the world series?
Manojar - pronounced like Manager