Got hard disk space ???

http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php

How much of the internet could you fit on that ?

Considering google's cache of the internet is less than 120GB and the index is about 15GB... quite a bit of it i'd say... including media.

Oh.... and I soooooo want one

where'd you hear that?

I have it on my computer.

thechad = google ?

yeah it runs on my desktop... my desktop is worth US$30bn... but its just a number..

I think their cache may be a bit higher. Man, I read on slashdot they have an estimated 80,000 servers or something insane like that.

its more like 10,000 and they're practically cpu's and ram with the index loaded on them

basically google buys end of life CPUS and slaps thousands of them together because its the cheapest cpu power you can buy, they also have a number of datacenters for full redundancy.

believe me, this cache is binary so theres a fuckload of compression goes on and there are no images or anything

Google has refused to confim how many machines they have, but estimates range between 10,000 and 100,000. Either way, it's many.

I read that to provide page excerpts that a context sensitive to your query they have to keep their entire index (including page contents) in memory. 120GB isn't much when you have that many servers - you could probably keep it in memory a few times over.

With google though, everything's guesswork, because they won't confirm anything.

um...
google's cache would be ~100 terabytes in total space, maybe more than that. how much of that is actually used for the cache I don't know, or what kind of compression is in usage. maybe with hardcore compression, duplicate eradication and tag stripping you'd get into the GB range.

servers may have 1-4gigs of ram each... and 80,000 of them?

my friend has a dual 64-bit Alpha box with 4gig of ram.... :O.. that's power