Dude_S - 12:30 am on Nov 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

and we all know how much it costs to change the oil on a Ferarri.

It depresses me to admit it, but I don't. :-(

Back to topic, it's not so much the algorithm only, but the huge capital expenses to operate data centers for crawling and serving results. Have you ever thought about how much power it takes to serve results for any obscure search term withing spli-seconds, picking from billions of web pages in your index and handling millions of such requests each second?

I read an article in Wired 2 or 3 years ago about search data centers and it was mind boggling. Not just the computing power, but also the huge amount of electric power they consume. They mentioned a case where a data center collapsed a local power grid and another where the expansion of the center was limited by the amount of available power long before they ran out of rack space.