We'll index the world by 2310, says Google

Good news for people who like making lists: Google's Eric Schmidt says that it will take another three hundred years before all the information in the world is neatly indexed and searchable.

Schmidt was speaking at the US' Association of National Advertisers' annual conference in Phoenix when a member of the audience asked how long it is likely to take before Google fulfilled its mission.

"We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years," CNet quotes Schmidt as saying. "The answer is it's going to be a very long time."

He estimated that out of the five million terabytes of information (no, we don't know how he counted it all up, either) in the world, a mere 170 terabytes have been indexed so far.

Schmidt did not elaborate on what kind of maths had been deployed to answer this riddle, so we can't say for sure whether the calculation only accounts for information that exists right now, or whether it includes new information that will be generated over the next three hundred years.

Presumably, however, by the time these questions are closer to being resolved, we puny humans will have ascended to become beings of pure information, all happily indexing and searching ourselves into digital oblivion. ®