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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.
300 years? I'd have thought their other plan would have been a lot quicker.
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...
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.
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....
"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".
...Google indexed it all in 6 days, and took a rest in the 7th...
gtkaml.org
Like Anne Frank's?
Fact is, it's incredibly hard to determine today what will have value tomorrow. Most of those thirteen year old girls (or 20-something geek guys) blogs will have no historical value. But some of those people will grow up to have a profound impact on the world (or they may not grow up, but still have a profound impact, as was the case with Anne Frank). It may be ten years from now. Or 50.
Who knows what the writing they do now might tell us about what brought them wherever they end up? When people write diaries on paper chances are reasonable they'll survive and show up in an attic somewhere. But as more and more content get online, we also risk facing the loss of entire generations worth of many types of information to bit rot and simple lack of foresight.
It's OK, they use linux. It does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?