You'll need about 1,000,000,000$ US for your first datacenter. All of the hardware needs to be in close proximity to get reasonable communication latency in your distributed indexing/processing.

There is a reason why competing search engines aren't popping up left and right.

Google's core business has always been about finding patterns in large amounts of data. Matching advertisements to users is just another form of pattern matching.

Argon is narcotic even at shallow depths.

I work at Google, in the facilities automation group. Google is really good at designing warehouse-scale computers that maximize the efficiency of electrical usage and heating/cooling. I suspect that this Nest acquisition is an attempt to leverage some of their heating/cooling expertise.

I fully expect that no one will believe this and will chalk it up to an advertising opportunity.

Google+ *IS* a login service with some common settings.

The problem is that there is a social page that is also known, by the public, as Google+.

Google is required by law to hand over information if there is a legal request, not an illegal one. Just as you are required to hand over your PC and encryption keys if there is a legal request made by a law enforcement agency.

I work at Google.

Before anything was reported by Snowden, plans were already in place to protect user data. It started with the switch to HTTPS, continued with us encrypting user data on disk, and we were beginning to encrypt data that was transferred between datacenters. The revelation that the NSA was tapping into undersea cables only accelerated the timeline.

Google hacked your browser? Or they just used a standard web technique to get results for a +1 button and Safari piled on a bunch of extra cookies?

Why would Google do this? If we assume that it was intentional, they must have known that, with all the scrutiny the company faces, someone was going to figure it out? And what would they get in return? A little bit of data on the handful of people who upped their Safari privacy settings and are unlikely to click on ads.

Does that make sense?

Did you think that the data on your hard drive is any safer from a "simple court order"? Good luck fighting that.

The content of the email message are not added to your profile. Search terms, yes. Sites visited, sometimes. But emails are just parsed in place and used independently to match ads.

Is there any evidence that email are used to build up a profile? I have never seen the contents of an email reflected anywhere else aside from right next to that same email. I get ads based on what I do web searches on, but I've never seen and ad based on my email correspondence, except for right next to the email message.

There won't be a lawsuit. The "big boys" will file an environmental complaint with their politicians and get the project shut down.

The transmission is encrypted with ECDHE, an Elliptical Curve Diffie-Hellman Exchange. Each connection is encrypted with a separate secret number which is dynamically generated and known only to the endpoints of the connection. The NSA or anyone else might be able to watch all the traffic, but it will still take anyone years to brute force it.

Do you understand how ECDHE works?

I way hired by Google as a 45 year old with a 2.2 GPA. And there are plenty of people here in their 40's. There may be age discrimination in SV, but I haven't seen it here at Google.

No one is arguing that Google hasn't gotten closer to the line. I just don't think they crossed it.