Google Caffeine article..."Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles."
Three miles of paper per second? That's staggering if true but I think they mean a pile of paper that's been waded up into balls, if the metaphor has some truth in it
In any case, a data architecture of this magnitude is simply amazing. Handling it well with fast results 24/7/365 is a magnificent technical achievement.
