[T]ake the number of servers that Google operates. The only figure the company will admit to is '10,000+'. They also claim to have '4+ petabytes' of disk storage, and have let slip that each server is fitted with two 80 gigabyte hard drives. Now a petabyte is 10 to the power of 15 bytes, so if Google had only 10,000 servers, that would come to 400 Gb per server. So again the numbers don't add up. I could go on, but you will get the point. But what it all comes down to is this: Google has far more computing power at its disposal than it is letting on. In fact, there have been rumours in the business for months that the Google cluster actually has 100,000 servers - which if true means that the company's technical competence beggars belief.

Now the interesting question raised by all this is: why the reticence? Most companies lose no opportunity to brag about their technology. (Think of all those Oracle ads.) Is this an example of Google behaving ultra-responsibly - being careful not to hype its prospects prior to an IPO? Or is it a sign of a deeper commercial strategy? The latter is what Garfinkel suspects. 'After all,' 'he says, 'if Google publicised how many pages it has indexed and how many computers it has in its data centres around the world, search competitors such as Yahoo!, Teoma, and Mooter would know how much capital they had to raise in order to have a hope of displacing the king at the top of the hill.' If truth is the first casualty of war, openness is the first casualty of going public.