Thanks to nicedreams on the forums for this piece of speculation...
"A rumour is spreading like the plague over the infinite paths of the Internet: Google has reached overbooking. The most popular creature in the virtual universe has space problems, or, more precisely, it could have them in the future. In fact, is seems that the most popular search engine in the world is about to reach the limit of its capacity of listed pages: 4,294,967,296. A numeric problem that is mainly due to a calculation error.
In Google's giant database, each link can occupy the space of only 4 bytes. In other words, even though the home page of the system has counted something like three million web pages, it is probable that the engine is about to run out. Or, if they do not change their system of listing links, the Internet will continue to grow and expand behind Google's back, but the new sites that will be created will be left out while its database will be full of an enormous quantity of obsolete pages that will crowd the pages of search results.
The analysts arrived at this conclusion by studying the recent "strange behaviour of the system" during the last renewal of its "contents." In fact, more or less once a month, Google reorders its listed pages. During this process, the system calculates the so-called PageRank of each page, based on the number of visits received and therefore, based on order of importance. It then incorporates the new pages found into its list of available web sites, periodically modifying the search results. This process of updating is called Google Dance in jargon and lasts approximately four days. However, during the last Google Dance many pages changed their position in the classification in an unexplainable way. This, together with other anomalous events has created unrest among users.
Since the first Google became a reality on the Internet in 1997, this search system has evolved and become, without a doubt, the most powerful instrument on the Internet. Not only have its creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page become multimillionaires, but they have also become two of the greatest heroes of the virtual community whose dominion extends all around the world, thanks in particular to their list of links. In a certain sense, Google is the spine of the Internet. And whatever problem afflicts its working can influence the growth of the very same Internet. But what can they do to continue to efficiently list a sea of pages that continue to multiply exorbitantly?"
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