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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

No, the NSA has one facility that would be a small/medium datacenter in the big league, but only if you assume that the NSA is as efficient as Google, which is a bit of a stretch.

NSA Utah: 65 MW Google Pryor, Oklahoma: 340 MW

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Megawatts are indicative of compute load, not storage load. I can definitely believe that Google is doing more compute than NSA, but that sounds more like a difference of need, not of ability.

What do you think the query pipeline looks like?

I can assure you that it's not mapping each query down to a single-sector disk read off an inverted index.

I think the query pipeline for NSA (relative to the scales of Google's query pipeline) looks like absense-of-query-pipeline. Hence NSA using less compute and thus (the reasoning goes) less power consumption.

Presumably that Google data center does a lot of compute intensive, non search related stuff - like GCP for one.

Another thing that people persistently misunderstand is the scale relationship between GCP and the rest of Google.

Even if all you say is true and it is truly impossible for the government to replicate any of what Google does, the point is moot. If the government is going to appropriate Google's index, might as well appropriate the datacenters too. Really, whats Google going to do with them once search is gone? According to you, it is the only thing they have have running there.

Might as well appropriate the engineers, too, and chain them to their desks and force them to keep everything working.

Truly an absurd comment. The US government is the largest employer in the country, with something in the order of 10 million employees. Are they all slaves chained to their desks?

It also does a lot of storage intensive, non search related stuff, like Google Cloud Storage.

Every Google data center does...everything.

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