Yahoo recently wrote on the Yahoo! Search blog, that their index now provides access to over 20 billion items (Compared to Googles 8.1 billion). A couple of days after Professor John Battelle responded with a post where he mentioned the fact that Google Scientists did not seem to fully agree on Yahoo claims. Well to make a long story shorter Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry, researchers at the NCSA under the supervision of Dr. Orville Vernon Burton, decided to make a brief study of the two rival indexes, and see just who’s got the biggest and most mighty index..

A Comparision of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices

Roland Piquepaille writes on his weblog: The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the largest genomics data centers in the world. In “The Hum and the Genome“, the Scientist writes about the IT infrastructure needed to handle the avalanche of data that researchers have to analyze. With its 2,000 processors and its 300 terabytes of storage, the data center uses today about 0.75 megawatts (MW) of power at a cost of €140,000 per year (about $170K). But the data center will need more than a petabyte of storage within three years, and its yearly electricity bill will reach €500,000 (more than $600K) for about 1.4 MW, enough to power more than a thousand homes. Read the full article, and see diagrams at the weblog.

* Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends | Decoding the Genome Needs Superpower