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How much does Google cost? Is it really free?
Have you ever wondered how much it costs us to have Google? Confused by the question…you probably thought Google was free. This is a misconception. The truth is Google is not free because like every other search engine it crawls the web and indexes what it finds. Google is by far the largest and now with its release of the Caffeine update the fastest crawler. It has about 25 billion pages in its index and it crawls pages as frequently as daily to once every 2 weeks. So you are probably still wondering…where is the cost? Well when Google crawls a site it uses that site’s bandwidth. Web site hosting companies charge $2 to $5 for 1 gigabyte of file transfer or bandwidth. So if Google is using bandwidth then someone is paying for it.
Now let’s do some math…hmm…takes me back to my school days…
25 billion pages x 130k (average page size) x 5 (average times pages get indexed over a month) = (calculator time) = 16 million gigabytes per month
Cost = 16 million x $3.5 (average hosting cost for bandwidth) = $56 million per month or $672 million per year. This is just an approximate number and doesn’t include video indexing which would bring the number up a lot more.So Google isn’t so free after all. However, on the bright side majority of sites rely on Google for their visitors so it is basically a cost associated with doing business on the web.
*Note a recent study by Charzinsk in 2010 states that the average web page size is 507k.
So based on that, the amount of bandwidth Google uses would be about $218.4 million per month or 2.6 billion dollars per year.http://www.allanpollett.com/cost-of-google.html" target="_new">Retweet this article
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905-417-9470or by email at allanp73@gmail.com
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Cost of Google - SEO article - Allan Pollett SEO
Friday, February 4, 2011
Microsoft Hides Your Email Address via Hotmail Aliases | News & Opinion
February 3, 2011 07.43pm ESTMicrosoft Hides Your Email Address via Hotmail Aliases
By Mark Hachman
- 0 Comments
Microsoft said Thursday that it has enabled aliases on Hotmail accounts, allowing people to create temporary email addresses.
Users who create an alias can route emails to that alias to a separate folder, which can then be managed separately. For example, email sent to "markthereporter@hotmail.com" will be sent to a private folder that will be accessible from my main Hotmail account.
Beginning today, users can add up to five email aliases per year to each account, up to a maximum of fifteen.
So far, the alias feature is exclusive to Microsoft; Google hasn't added it to its Gmail mail system.
Microsoft positioned the alias feature as the email equivalent of a one-time credit card number that can be used on a dodgy shopping site. "Let's say you're in the market for a new car," Dharmesh Mehta wrote in a blog post. "There are a bunch of websites that will email you price quotes, sales alerts, etc. During your car search, these messages are helpful, but once you're done, they become clutter that can be difficult to stop. By using an alias on these websites instead of your main email address, you can avoid this. And when you're done, just turn the alias off, ensuring future unwanted messages that are sent to that alias don't land in your inbox."
Gmail does allow users to add a " " to their email addresses to create a sort of alias; addressing emails to "johnqpublic101 home@gmail.com" will route the email to the johnqpublic101 inbox, add indicative stars to them, or route them to the trash. But Mehta also argued that such methods are detectable, including by humans.
Hotmail also allows a user to access email stored in a non-Microsoft account, pulling the information via POP, rather than IMAP.
In December, Hotmail added sandboxing to its email accounts, which can protect the system from malicious scripts. The "Active Views" technology isolates JavaScript. Microsoft also added additional security verification technology, using cell phones and a trusted PC. All are followons to a revamped Hotmail client that Microsoft began rolling out last summer.
