Google vs Internet: Internet ftw
Following up from the hullabaloo over Google's non-existent plan to replace the Internet, let's remind ourselves about the scales we're talking about here.
The Internet: 106,875,138 servers, growing at an ever-accelerating rate that was last clocked at 1.63 million per month.
Google: 450,000 at last estimate, in July 2006. In April 2004 Rich Skrenta quoted the figure at 100,000, giving a monthly growth rate between estimates of just over 15,000... which is evidently where Rich gets his current figure of 500,000.
To be fair, Google's growth rate is currently outpacing that of the Internet, but at the moment it's less than 1/200th the size. To get to 1/120th the size of the Internet, Google will have to keep building data centres until... the year 2030.
What was that about "a huge proxy server for the Internet"? Mmm-hmm. Google is having enough trouble providing resources to run its own applications, which of course is what all these data centres are actually for. The Internet can take care of itself.
The Internet: 106,875,138 servers, growing at an ever-accelerating rate that was last clocked at 1.63 million per month.
Google: 450,000 at last estimate, in July 2006. In April 2004 Rich Skrenta quoted the figure at 100,000, giving a monthly growth rate between estimates of just over 15,000... which is evidently where Rich gets his current figure of 500,000.
To be fair, Google's growth rate is currently outpacing that of the Internet, but at the moment it's less than 1/200th the size. To get to 1/120th the size of the Internet, Google will have to keep building data centres until... the year 2030.
What was that about "a huge proxy server for the Internet"? Mmm-hmm. Google is having enough trouble providing resources to run its own applications, which of course is what all these data centres are actually for. The Internet can take care of itself.
posted by Paul Montgomery | 1:24 am
4 Comments:
As Google wants to organise the world's information, they need a data centre much bigger than the internet.
Ah, but then you come up against the old chestnut: how can you make a perfect model of something without recreating that something in entirety? And I think recreating the Internet is impossible, as shown by the above numbers.
The Goog has bigger fish to fry. As well as interent data, there's all that other data we have that they haven't yet touched. Books, music, every recorded performance known to man, every phonecall, every stock keeping unit. A data center more than 100 times the size of internet may not be enough.
interent should be internet, unless we have to pay rent on it now as well.
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