Yet another idle thread for a lazy Friday afternoon. The more techie among you may have noticed several references on the web recently to the mighty Google's expanding hardware base, and how it allows them to implement rapid improvements that the rest of the search engine world are finding hard to follow. A good reference to this is:-

http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html

Essentially, those cheery nerds at the 'plex have built the world's largest distributed supercomputer, comprised of perhaps 100,000 PCs networked together in a robust fashion that was until recently probably only achievable in a lab. Google is essentially an unbelievable quantity of cheap and cheerful caseless motherboard + disk combos slotted into mechano-built trays. So cheap, in fact, that if a PC dies, it may sit unfixed in its slot for ages, because finding and repairing it would cost Google more in manpower than simply adding a completely new machine into the mix, and letting it autoconfigure itself.

So what, I hear you yawn.... well, Google are now storing over a petabyte of data (essentially a copy of the entire web, plus their own metadata, source, etc). So here's my question.... Why don't Google cut out the middleman and start offering hosting too? Instead of a 'copy' of the web, out of date by between a few hours and a few years, why don't they host it too, and make their own lives easier, and their search facilities constantly up to date? Points to consider - they are already expanding their other services (gmail, anyone? April fool or not, it gives you some idea of the scale of their resources - 1 GIGABYTE of free email space???) and could even conceivably offer FREE hosting, in return for the ubiquitous AdSense being shown on every hosted page a la Geo****ties. Why store a copy, when they can store the real thing, and make some money off all that storage at the same time too?

'Twill never happen, I hear you cry. Wrong. If it can be done, those insane technobs at Google will give it a go. This is what happens when you give techies a bit of money. And where will it end? With Google effectively 'owning' the web, and all other computers becoming archaic 'addons' to the 'Googleweb'; small stagnant millponds way off the thundering main course of the mighty River Google. Microsoft tried this a long time ago, but didn't have the technical skills to implement it in an irresistible way, although they may have had the cash. Google, on the other hand, DO have the resources, thanks to the incredibly cheap way they can add ram and cpu cycles into their mix.

Now when Google end up 'owning' the web, what impact do you think that will have on affiliate sites? Do you think Google will fancy sharing some of the revenue from hungry merchants in any way at all except for their own tried and tested PPC schemes? Strange days, my traffic-napping friends, strange days...

Discuss!

(PS, not the round thing they throw about in the Olympics, thats a 'discus').
(PPS, technical objections to this idea must not include any lame 'not their core business model' kind of hoping, ok? :-)
(PPPS, no 'what if the giant network of computer nodes actually evolves into artifically intelligent consciousness' scifi stuff - that's next weeks' Friday Idleness!!!)