> designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger
While google says:
> The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexi...
Seems like the government already has the expertise and equipment required to handle data at Google scale :)
One of your suggestions was
> That's why the stipulation that other entities be allowed to mirror the index - they can optimize the index for their own purposes and rankings on their own hardware.
And the point is that there's nobody who can do this outside of Google, Microsoft (who also does), Facebook, and Amazon.
Not to mention the problems of actually getting the data. You're at the scale of data where trucks of disks are faster data transfer than cables unless you have direct fiber backbone connections.
You're just comparing two storage numbers without taking anything else that running Google at a global scale requires.