News: Google's Greatness

Google is making three buildings, each as large as a football field, in Oregon with the sole purpose of housing servers. Granted, Microsoft and Yahoo are both doing the same thing, though perhaps on a slightly smaller scale.

Just for background, in March, 2001, Google had 8,000 servers running. In 2003, it was around 100,000.

"Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years."

"Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google."

Google = Borg. I love it! You will be assimilated!

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