In another effort to showcase their talent to the digital world, Google have broken the record for sorting 1TB of data using their sorting software MapReduce. The search wizards managed to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record was 209 seconds on 910 computers.

Taking it up a level, the data centers tried the same experiment sorting 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) onto 4,000 computers with took six hours and two minutes. Thats quick sorting !

These figures may not mean much to you or I, but think of it this way… the more efficiently search engines can process the data they collate, the quicker we receive our search queries. So come on Google, bring on sub 50 seconds!