Friday May 05, 2006

So Google's CEO Eric Schmidt says his servers are full, hmm. Tying that to SEO'ers griping about their indexing, Andrew Orlowski speculates that it's web spam besetting big daddy. Could be but the hard data isn't out in the wild. The numbers that we can see are that Google is spending several banana republics worth of GDP on capital expenses:

Google continued to make substantial capital investments, mainly in computer servers, networking equipment and its data centers. It spent $345 million on such items in the first quarter, more than double the level of last year. Yahoo, its closest rival, spent $142 million on capital expenses in the first quarter.
Referring to the sheer volume of Web site information, video and e-mail that Google's servers hold, Schmidt said: "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis." (read more)

If the problem is spam, then certainly it's Google's own doing. The elephant in the room is that the acceleration of web spam everyone's talking about is fueled by AdSense, often aided and abetted by Blogger splogs, Google Pages, Google Base, etc. The spam ecosystem is within Google's capacity to reign in but the don't-be-evil company is making too much money on click fraud with plausible deniability to do anything about it. Is Google having problems handling web spam and "filling up" their machines? Cry me a river, all the way to the bank.

spam   google   adsense   splog   web spam