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300 Years to Index the World's Information

Posted by Zonk on from the everything-else-to-be-destroyed dept.

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.'"

1 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What About... by htrp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would assume that it would be to index the collective sum of information, even as it is growing. It's probably a lot quicker to index something than it is to generate it. With probable future advances in computing power and the development of new algorithms, it should be entirely possible that the speed of indexing (which already probably surpasses the speed of information production) would catch up to all the data that still hasn't been indexed.

    Think of it in terms of taking a ratio comparison of two infinite series.