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.'"

Comments

a small margin of error

[CupBeEmpty]

I think it is important to remember that this was a math exercise not a serious study with predictive power. I remember several years ago people thought the human genome project was insane. They thought it would take hundreds of years to catalog our entire genome and cost some ludicrous numbers of trillions of dollars.

Then:

In 1999, the goal of producing a "working draft" seemed very far away, with less than 15 percent of the genome sequenced. If the accelerated goals had not already generated a sense of urgency in the consortium, a decision by the sequencing center leaders at a February meeting in Houston would. At the meeting, the leaders accepted Dr. Collins' challenge to ramp up their efforts to produce a "working draft" by spring of 2000. By January 2000, the centers were collectively producing 1,000 base pairs a second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 2 billion of the human genome's 3 billion base pairs were sequenced by March. At a White House ceremony hosted by President Bill Clinton in June 2000, Dr. Collins and J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, which had carried out its own sequencing strategy, announced that the majority of the human genome had been sequenced. [from here

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.

Re:I Call Bullshit

[TRS80NT]

It's grammar.

Re:The major question is

[jupiter909]

They take the rate of current indexing of data, then take the rate at which data is being added to the pile by looking at current trends and possible future trends of people hooking up to the net and adding to that pile, then take the rate at which their systems advance to do the indexing of that pile. They then pass those variables through a custom magic google app and wait a bit and then, tada, the answer 300 is spat out.

You need remember that they could be way off, if some major breakthrough in storage technolgy happens tomorrow all those figure would need be recalculated. At best it is a very very rough idea of how long it is going to take them to catch up to the worlds information and keep it in a current index.

My guess:

[imsabbel]

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...