Sadly, I did not win the Powerball Lottery (I admit it is hard to win when you don’t play) so I am still here writing blog posts. Oh well, I kind of like my job.
The frenzy did get me thinking about how big is a billion. A little back of the napkin math suggests that my Google Search Appliance (GSA) implementation team has indexed over a quarter of a billion documents and records for our customers. How much content is that?
If each document was an average of 5 pages long, that would amount to a stack of paper 98.6 miles tall, or roughly the beginning of Low Earth Orbit for satellites. If the documents were about 100KB in size, it would take 23 one terabyte hard drives to store them.
Surprisingly, it would only take thirteen G100 Google Search Appliances, or three G500’s, to index this many documents. So everybody, get out there and fill up your GSAs!
What was in all of those documents? Lots of pictures of cats with funny sayings underneath and 80’s Depeche Mode mp3’s? Hopefully not. : )
This is a broad generalization, but most of the content was probably office productivity documents — everything from corporate memos, to technical manuals, to handbooks and regulations. Other interesting content sources have included:
Real estate contracts for retail stores
Purchase orders and invoices for a beverage manufacturer
Standard operating procedures for a pet food manufacturer
Customer support case notes for a high-tech software company
Academic course catalogs for an ivy league university
Circuit board schematics for a silicon chip manufacturer
Corporate training videos for a credit card company
Sales literature for a luxury car maker
Oil well test logs for a petrochemical producer
Item inventories and aisle locations for a grocery store chain
TV and movie listings for a premium cable network
And the list goes on and on and on. I continue to be amazed at the seemingly infinite number of ways the Google Search Appliance can be used. Our implementation team never has a dull moment. The Powerball money would have been nice, but this job is a pretty great runner-up.