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!