Tag Archive for 'Yahoo'

World’s fastest growing search engine? Twitter!

Published on July 7, 2010 in Google, Twitter, business, social media and technology. View Comments

According to Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, Twitter now handles around 800 million search queries per day, or more than 24 billion per month. This is a massive 33% more than it said it was handling back in April.

To put that into some perspective, Google reaches around 88 billion per month, so it’s pretty impressive that Twitter has already moved well past a quarter of that. In addition, Bing only achieves around 4.1 billion and Yahoo around 9.4 billion per month.

So as well as being an information network (as Stone prefers to call it), it seems that Twitter is now the world’s fastest growing search engine. It’ll be very interesting to see how much revenue they manage to pull in with their new Promoted Tweets initiative on search. Although quite different, Google has certainly done fairly well out of search advertising!

Twitter Search

via Fast Company

Hundreds of millions of social networkers contribute to new data center building boom

Published on May 26, 2010 in Facebook, clean tech, social media and technology. View Comments

There seems to be a data center building boom currently going on in Silicon Valley, partly driven by the many hundreds of millions of online social networkers.

Internet mapInternet map image from The Opte Project

Apparently there are 7 projects underway in Santa Clara alone. If these reports are to be believed, unlike during the over-funded, over-development during the dot-com boom, construction is struggling to meet demand from the likes of fast growing companies such as Facebook.

According to this report, Facebook is looking to grab all the space in two new data centers and a good part of a third that’s still being built. However, it seems Facebook is leasing some space to meet its short term needs until it builds its own in-house.

When Facebook only(!) had 300 million users, it said it had 30,000 servers. User numbers have increased by well over 100 million since then.

It’s good to see that Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have servers housed at Digital Realty’s Santa Clara operation. These data centers have a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.

It’s got to take a hell of a lot of power to run all the servers these companies (and we) are using daily. As well as being efficient, wouldn’t it be great if this power came from clean energy sources at some stage in the near future?