I never knew Google was THIS massive!
The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you’re getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don’t know what a Petabyte is? Check this out:
An MP3 is about 3MB. The Beatles recorded 214 singles- that’s close to just one gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes makes a Terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte. Lost and confused? We were too.
Our poor mortal minds haven’t been so boggled by the ‘big numbers’ since a legendary wag fooled his elders out of ‘quite a lot’ of rice by using a chess board a few hundred years ago. We’ve used the same unit of measurement – grains of rice – to try to put Google’s electronic brain power into perspective.
Let’s relate a grain of rice to a byte. A byte is normally eight binary bits, eg ‘10011000’. It can also be written as a two digit hexadecimal number. In terms of data, a byte is generally used to store a letter. One byte = one letter = one grain of rice.
Bearing this new representation in mind, we can now look at a kilobyte (1024 bytes) as a small bowl of rice. It’s about half a portion, not enough to fill you up – and in data terms a kilobyte would only be a few paragraphs of text – not much to mentally stimulate you there either.
Next up is the megabyte – which is around the size of all the text on an average website, or a short novel. On the rice scale, a megabyte would be a 25kilo bag of rice; enough to feed over 420 people in one sitting, if you have enough chairs.
1024 times larger still is the gigabyte. Back in 1995, I bought a PC with a gigabyte of hard drive space, and managed to store everything I needed on there for the next few years.
To store a gigabyte of rice I’d have needed a bigger garden…. the size of two shipping containers to be more precise. And I could have treated all of those curry-loving Mancunians to a meal. The equivalent of finding a single word in a gigabyte of text is finding a few grains of rice somewhere inside those two containers.
Moving up the scale again we reach the terabyte, equivalent to 1024 gigabytes. I have a terabyte drive sitting in front of me – it’s the size of a small shoebox. But to search through all that data – even on my most powerful desktop machine – would take longer than my patience could bear.
To transport a ‘terabyte’ of rice we’d need to hire this container ship. We could use its contents to feed everybody in the EU.
Finally, we arrive at the mighty petabyte. At this stage, we’re well beyond the size of data that most individuals or small companies handle, and into the realms of some of our Enterprise clients. It’s the same as 210 of the largest container ships that have ever been built, EIGHTY bowls of rice for every person on the planet, or…
…what you’d need to cover central London in 1 metre of rice!
Remember, Google processes 20 petabytes of data every day; or if you prefer – over 4,000 gigantic ships bursting with rice, 1,600 bowls for everyone on the planet, or central London drowned in 20 metres of the stuff. This is spread over 72,000 jobs each taking an average of 7 minutes to complete. Their data processing capability is a big contributor to their position at the top of the online world, and also no doubt to their estimated £1million monthly electricity bill.
If you have a data network – whether it’s projected to carry giga-, tera-, or petabytes – then drop us a line to find out how our IT Support services can help your business. We could even treat you to a bowl of rice.
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meneame.net on Wed (18 Jun) @ 4:04 pm
Si un byte es un grano de arroz, ¿Como de grande es Google? [EN]…
Ingeniosa analogía para comprender el verdadero tamaño de la información digital. Si un byte es un grano de arroz, Google procesaría cada día suficiente arroz para dar de comer a la humanidad durante 800 años (20 petabytes) o para cubrir el centr…
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web design company on Wed (18 Jun) @ 5:18 pm
By this analogy, a single MP3 (by their estimated size of 3mb) is a 75 kilo (165 lb) bag of rice that could feed 1260 people. This makes the analogy not very effective; most people consider MP3s small.
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mind on Wed (18 Jun) @ 5:34 pm
.. and my laptop cpu can process 11 petabytes per day. what’s your point?
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Jesse on Wed (18 Jun) @ 6:39 pm
Good post showing the sheer size and volume of data that Google processes a day! 20 petabytes/day = 7.1 exabytes/year! Truly phenomenal. You have to have a massive infrastructure to do that, and Google has the biggest, baddest one. Here’s a related article about their platform and infrastructure, if you’re interested: http://fishtrain.com/2007/08/30/googles-trading-floor/
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Nico on Wed (18 Jun) @ 10:21 pm
20 minutes after processing that data they’re hungry for more.
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Mikhail Tuknov on Wed (18 Jun) @ 11:45 pm
Great article
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Brian Carter on Thu (19 Jun) @ 2:00 am
Youch. Makes barriers to entry to any competitor seem a little bit forboding, doesn’t it?
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Ingrid Alongi on Thu (19 Jun) @ 3:22 am
Wow, that’s a wonderful summary to put things in perspective.
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Nikki Pilkington on Thu (19 Jun) @ 7:26 am
Nice analogy - love it!
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Simon Dance on Thu (19 Jun) @ 7:47 am
Excellent illustration and certainly an eye opener…
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Robert on Thu (19 Jun) @ 7:51 am
Wow… that is a lot of rice.
Even with all that rice they still manage to get a lot of Spam in there! hehehehe…
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Ummon on Thu (19 Jun) @ 9:26 am
Average of 243GB of data per second…
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Bananas Development Blog on Thu (19 Jun) @ 9:54 am
Wie groß ist eigentlich Google ?…
Hat sich jemand schon mal die Gedanken gemacht wie groß die Datenmenge bei google ist ?
Nein, ich auch nicht, aber hier sind ein paar Seiten die das ein wenig hinterleuchten.
I never knew Google was THIS massive!
Paper: MapReduce: Simplified Data…
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Danny on Thu (19 Jun) @ 10:14 am
Youch 4,000 ships worth of rice per day!
How the hell does Google do it!
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tou.ch » Blog Archive » Google Rechenpower lässt London unter Reiskörnern verschwinden on Thu (19 Jun) @ 11:01 am
[...] Google verarbeitet täglich die gigantische Datenmenge von 20 Petabyte. Im Weblog von Managed Networks wird versucht dies zu veranschaulichen. Sie gehen davon aus, dass ein Reiskorn einem Byte entspricht. Dann wird immer mit neuen Beispeilen gesteigert, bis sie beinem Petabyte sind, dass dafür sorgt, dass ganz London mit einer Reisschicht von einem Meter Höhe bedeckt ist. Bei 20 Petabyte wäre London unter einer Reisschicht von 20 Meter begraben. Nachzulesen hier: http://blog.managednetworks.co.uk/it-support/googles-20-petabytes/ [...]
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Hjörtur Smárason on Thu (19 Jun) @ 12:12 pm
I guess it’s a good thing they don’t transport all that data by ships …
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required on Thu (19 Jun) @ 2:30 pm
Chill out. Here’s a less-overheated look at things:
A terabyte is what fits on one hard drive costing $200 (e.g., http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-External-Drive/dp/B000VZCEUI/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1213885151&sr=8-1). It takes about a day to read or write on a $1000 laptop computer.
A petabyte requires 1000 of these hard drives ($200,000) and 1000 laptops ($1 million).
20 petabytes takes us to 20,000 hard drives ($4 million) and 20,000 laptops ($20 million).
I’ve left out networking as an exercise for the student.
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links for 2008-06-20 « Simply… A User on Fri (20 Jun) @ 12:31 am
[...] I never knew Google was THIS massive! (tags: math example google data * fun) [...]
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Just… on Nothing original on Sat (21 Jun) @ 10:51 pm
[...] Google in terms of rice [...]
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NiallOK’s Blog » Blog Archive » I’ll fire your fox on Sun (22 Jun) @ 3:07 am
[...] In other news, I never realised Google was that massive either. [...]
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den on Tue (24 Jun) @ 10:13 pm
Nice
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Renegade Conservatory Guy on Tue (24 Jun) @ 11:00 pm
If you boil the rice it gets even bigger.
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Start Acknowledging The Petabyte Era - Skyline Chat - Board on Wed (25 Jun) @ 7:38 am
[...] Today, 07:37 AM Ok, now let’s get this all straight. A binary bit is either a 1 or a 0, it’s literally akin to a tiny lil light switch, either on or off. A byte is eight binary bits, or for example, "10011000." Each character on your keyboard (eg: 5, j, =, *, |, ~) is represented by one byte. A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, or 1024 characters. In data terms, a kilobyte would only be a few paragraphs of text. A megabyte is 1024 kilo bytes, about the size of a short novel. One mega byte = 1,048,576 bytes - or letters/characters in that novel. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. My computer’s hard drive has 160 gigabytes in it. My first computer had four, that sad little bitch. Now, 1024 gigabytes makes a terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte. So a petabyte is 1,048,576 gigabytes. This article puts it all into context using grains of rice: I never knew Google was THIS massive! [...]
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A quantidade de dados processada pelo Google, transformada em arroz | Cybervida on Thu (26 Jun) @ 1:36 am
[...] Nial Kennedy’s Weblog. Descobri isso através de uma interessantíssima postagem no blog da Managed Networks em que ela compara bytes a caroços de arroz, um byte = um caroço de [...]
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Shane on Thu (26 Jun) @ 7:56 am
Makes you wonder what would really happen is someone started messing with Google and how much damage could be done.
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Vida Universitária - O blog dos universitários » A quantidade de dados do Google em arroz on Thu (26 Jun) @ 11:38 am
[...] blog da Managed Networks se compara bytes a caroços de arroz, em que um byte = um caroço de [...]
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Google boggles the mind « Ideasblog on Thu (26 Jun) @ 11:49 am
[...] 26, 2008 Google boggles the mind Posted by nisheedhi under Uncategorized I never knew Google was THIS massive! “The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think [...]
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Pete White on Thu (26 Jun) @ 11:55 am
lol great post, that is a lot of rice!
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Cesar R Bagatoli » Blog Archive » A quantidade de dados processada pelo Google, e sua equivalência em arroz on Thu (26 Jun) @ 4:36 pm
[...] Nial Kennedy’s Weblog. Descobri isso através de uma interessantíssima postagem no blog da Managed Networks em que ela compara bytes a caroços de arroz, um byte = um caroço de [...]
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singapore web hosting on Thu (26 Jun) @ 6:18 pm
wow, that size is real scary, i wonder what will we become without google
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Good Post on Thu (26 Jun) @ 10:27 pm
Liked the post - good analogy. Will use it with my class ASAP. Nuff said.
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Google: Big Rice Machine : Beyond Search on Fri (27 Jun) @ 5:02 am
[...] To say that Google is really big is like saying New York City is a little seaside village. It’s a complete oversimplification. Posted in a blog at Managed Networks, the following analogy helped me get a better handle on a number too large to comprehend. Think of a single piece of data as a grain of rice. Google cooks 20 Petabytes of rice a day. That’s enough rice for every person on the planet to have 1,600 bowls each of the white stuff for dinner. Now that’s a San Francisco treat. You can read the original rice analysis here. [...]
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Digitalia – Links For Friday 27th June 2008 on Fri (27 Jun) @ 6:30 pm
[...] Google Buries Central London In Rice As Part Of World’s Worst Publicity Stunt It’s possible I have become confused about the metaphor here. Still, this is worth a look if you’d like to get an idea of the scale of Google’s operation. It’s slightly terrifying. And full of rice. (tags: google visualization funny) [...]
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Jason on Fri (27 Jun) @ 6:59 pm
Rice a good analogy, but rice isn’t data.
1 byte = 1 character
A good sized novel has about 75,000 words and if you assume a word length of 5 characters you get 375,000 characters or bytes per novel.
Scaling that up… 20 petabytes is equivalent to 60 billion novels a day…
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Gadgets Gizmos on Fri (27 Jun) @ 8:05 pm
I wish they could host my websites for free on their network
interesting article
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¿Qué tan grande es Google? » Gadget Dominicana on Sat (28 Jun) @ 2:01 pm
[...] [Ver enlace en inglés] [...]
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Henry on Sat (28 Jun) @ 3:24 pm
This analogy is gold.. will treat my students on internet marketing to this..
It really makes you worry about the mono/bipolization of internet search, eh?
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Daily Links on Mon (30 Jun) @ 2:32 am
[...] I never knew Google was THIS massive! (tags: google visualization technology petabyte data funny rice) [...]
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Wow the internet is big! « Sheepless in Rhode Island on Mon (30 Jun) @ 9:33 pm
[...] http://blog.managednetworks.co.uk/it-support/googles-20-petabytes/ [...]
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tim on Tue (1 Jul) @ 6:47 pm
for all the rice in china?
can we make gas out of it?
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j. sessoms on Tue (1 Jul) @ 7:11 pm
Ho Hum
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Kim Burgess on Wed (2 Jul) @ 1:16 am
That last picture of London is so obviously photoshopped - there’s a blue sky in the background.
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Matt Ellsworth on Wed (2 Jul) @ 3:31 pm
great post. Thats a crazy amount of data to be processed every day.
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IT Support Snippets on Wed (2 Jul) @ 8:46 pm
Thats a lorra,lorra data…
20 petabytes….hmmmmm
now thats a lot of data per day!
……
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Zombie Repellent on Wed (2 Jul) @ 10:12 pm
it keeps growing too. Unstoppable
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Ben Koshkin on Wed (2 Jul) @ 10:13 pm
That was clever. Benjamin Koshkin
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spud on Thu (3 Jul) @ 12:32 am
If you dont use rice but potatoes instead how many chip butties would I get in a gigabyte.;)
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Avenues Nepal on Thu (3 Jul) @ 5:52 am
WOW!! i knew google is the #1 search engine!! But never knew it was this big!!
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Money Ideas on Sat (5 Jul) @ 10:23 pm
I liked the way you explain bytes, KB etc.
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Sean on Fri (11 Jul) @ 4:20 am
What is this “Google” you keep referring too?
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Phil E. Drifter on Fri (11 Jul) @ 10:15 am
Not only is that last pic obviously photoshopped, this is a poor comparison because, while a true byte is 1024 bits, (MB is 1024 KB, etc) vendors actually go by 1000k=1M. When you order a 200G drive from a vendor, ANY vendor, you’ll be shocked to learn the actual capacity of the drive is only 174B. It comes from the difference between a true kb (1024b=1kb) and the rationalized one (1000b=1kb).
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pligg.com on Fri (11 Jul) @ 11:52 am
I never knew Google was THIS massive!…
The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you’re getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don’t know what a Pe…
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Geoserv on Fri (11 Jul) @ 11:53 am
STUMBLED!
Wow, thats unbelievable.
VOTED for this post at:
http://www.newsdots.com/industrynews/i-never-knew-google-was-this-massive/
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loser on Sat (12 Jul) @ 3:40 am
WOW! Obviously fake comment! Love it! Thanks for posting!
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Green on Tue (15 Jul) @ 11:49 am
And now just imagine how much electrical power they need to do that and what is the pollution coming from that - SCARY !!!
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Alexander on Tue (15 Jul) @ 1:24 pm
One MP3 can feed a lot of people depending on how the copyright suite ends
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boombuz on Wed (16 Jul) @ 2:53 pm
Never heard this kind of information, really good.
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nick on Wed (16 Jul) @ 4:01 pm
great article, clearly explains how huge google is
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Cake on Tue (22 Jul) @ 11:13 pm
Cool rice page
I once got huckled for a grain of rice.
In a tourist trap a guy wrote our names (mine and hers) on a grain of rice with a 0.1mm pen sealed it in a plastic love heart pendant and charged me a fiver.(10$) the things you do for love.
Eric
(Spot the anagram)
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Why Stop on Fri (25 Jul) @ 1:14 pm
Why stop at a petabyte? Seriously that’s weak dude. Huge fail. Unless you rewrite this to encompass yottabytes then it is doom. DOOM!!!!