Google's Caffeine

There has been widespread (worldspread) concern about Google's collection of data and many are already viewing Google as the 21st Century's Big Brother. I'm personally not so concerned; I'm aware, so I reduce the risks: I don't use credit cards nor do I use Internet Banking and so on. Even so, my footprint is all over the web and there's no way I can ever be anonymous. I'm also aware that a remote computer (running windows, which I don't) can be hacked within 15 minutes of logging on to the net. And Google analytics is running in the background, all the time.

In short, I'm neither naive nor paranoid; I believe the Cloud is a good thing and I embrace it.

But still, I'm staggered by the figures released by Google regarding their new Caffeine engine:
* Caffeine will constantly monitor the web to search, store and index information
* It will process information in parallel, not in linear fashion (which means thousands of
pages--like this one--at once) every second
* the database can hold 100 million GB of information