WebProNews

Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to a question at a conference about how long it would take to index the world's information.

Taking questions during an appearance at the Association of National Advertisers in Phoenix, Mr. Schmidt disclosed it would take a pretty long time to get all the information in the world into Google's server farms.

CNET News noted his comment in a report. "We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years," Mr. Schmidt said. "The answer is it's going to be a very long time."

Out of the estimated 5 million terabytes of global information, Google's only got around to about 170 terabytes after its first 7 years of existence.

During his talk, he extolled the virtues of online advertising, and noted he was a skeptic about their potential when he took the job as CEO. He made the most critical point to the audience, as the report notes:

Advertising is increasing on the Internet and cable television, and showing modest to no growth in newspapers and magazines, Schmidt said. "The cost per revenue dollar of online ad systems is so much lower than" for offline advertising, he said.

Mr. Schmidt has definitely found the value in Google's online advertising model now, since the company's non-traditional IPO and subsequent trading have pushed shares to more than triple their first price.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.