Google claims new search appliance can index a billion docs

Google announced this week that they released version 6.0 of their yellow enterprise search appliance and all but gushed that it had the ability to scale up to a billion documents. According to the cheesy YouTube video [1] they created, that's more than Google.com indexed in the year 2000. It's an impressive number, and to put into perspective how big it is, Google posted these statistics in their Google Blog announcement:

"One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years."

But wait, before you get too excited about this, Andriaan Bloem [2], an analyst at CMS Watch suggests that Google has been famous for its hype around the search appliance. Further analysis has shown a different story and that's the case here as well. The feature that would allow you to scale to the said billion documents is actually a Beta feature and right now, well the box says 30 million docs. That's a big difference: 30 million versus the claimed one billion.

Bloem all but rolls his eyes in the manner of frustrated teen when he examines the claims around this new release. He's been there, done that, got the t-shirt and he's not impressed. A billion might be out there some day for your enterprise, but some day doesn't appear to be today with this particular release.

For more information:
- see the Official Google Blog announcement [3]
- and Adriaan Bloem's post [4] on CMS Watch

Related Articles:
One on One with Nitin Mangtani of Google Search Appliance [5]
Google site search upgrade includes on-demand indexing [6]
Three interesting new search tools [7]
Google unveils Search Wiki [8]