Google's big picture

In case students and other Web researchers were holding their breath till Google's spider bots had crawled all the Net's information, we now know that would not be good for their health. Even though a contributor takes a visual guess (on today's New York Times opinion page) as to how much info the search engine will cover in 2084 (including what's in "Your Brain"), Google has just released its "300-year plan." Its CEO Eric Schmidt "estimates that Google won't manage to index all the world's information until around the 24th century," ZDNET UK reports. How are they doing right now? "Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed," ZDNET says Schmidt told his audience at an Association of National Advertisers conference in Phoenix.