blaze - 2:00 am on Apr 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Given a large enough compression index, it is possible to achieve up to 1:10 and even better compression ratios.

Considering that Google handles all those cached pages, one would assume they have some pretty good compression/decompression abilities.

At about 2$ / Gigabyte, that comes to about 20 cents a user. They could buy themselves ten million users for 2 million dollars (space wise, all else being equal).

Given that alexa says that 74% of msn.com's traffic is hotmail.msn.com and 39% of yahoo's traffic is mail.yahoo.com, I believe this is a legitimate (and necessary!) move on Google's part.

[edited by: blaze at 2:01 am (utc) on April 1, 2004]