Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
(100,000,000 * GB) / TB == 97,656.
So Caffeine’s current index could be stored non-redundantly on ~98 thousand 1TB drives. Newegg’s cheapest 1TB drive is currently $70, so that’s very-naively 6.8 million USD in HDD drive costs alone.
and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.
And it sounds like you’re on the hook for buying “hundreds” of 1TB drives each day, with a burn rate between $14,000/day (200 TB drives) to $63,000/day (900 TB drives).
My math is wildly naive as economies of scale push prices down and machine costs + redundancy + networking + labor + energy drive costs up, but it’s fun to think about.
Video: Matt Cutts Gives More Caffeine Details, Talks Site Speed:
The second ingredient that Matt discussed is that of site speed. From the sound of it, speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO moving in to 2010. He says that a number of people within Google consider speed to be very important to the web, and they are considering if that should play a role in the rankings of websites in search results.
According to Cutts, speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but that may very well change. Watch the video for more details about Caffeine and Google’s resources for helping webmasters improve site speed.
What a terrible idea — I hope it doesn’t go through.
This idea optimizes against great User Experience (sites with great graphics+ajax load slower than HTML 2.0-sites), technological progress (libraries+frameworks are getting bigger as web apps do more) and content-egalitarianism (often the best sites are some lone wolf’s hobby on a shared host while corporates sites can afford fat pipes and dedicated metal).
