Filed under: Products and services, Google (GOOG)
Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is famous for just giving things away for free. The company is a large part of the information economy and allows anyone on the planet with internet access free use of its search engine, email, documents, photos and more. In return, it receives lucrative advertising dollars that mostly originate from its search engine. Well, the next free service is about to roll out — to large scientific concerns no less.
Google’s Research website will begin offering the free hosting of those enormous datasets scientists use to predict weather, decipher the human genome and fold proteins. Google will make available terabytes of information on its research website for this purpose. A terabyte is 1,000 Gigabytes. That PC you’re using right now? It probably contains 80 Gigabytes to 250 Gigabytes.
In addition to offering free online storage hosting for scientific purposes, the company will also make available algorithms that can be used to look at and study information contained within those huge, uploaded scientific datasets. In addition to allowing universities unparalleled access to storage and algorithm use for their research needs, those at home who want to explore scientific information never before widely available will have the capability to do so. All that remains will be the large question of how researchers will actually transport their datasets to Google’s system, but for now, the theory is that Google will ship a hard drive array in a suitcase to any interested party so that datasets can be sent to it then shipped back to Google.
Another day, another righteous Google project that seemingly has no monetary impact to the company but does have significant public impact. Isn’t life grand for Google?
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