Think about THE big one - google. (First, China for this example is avoided because much Chinese data is ILLEGAL to be provided for search outside of China)
If there is data generated by people in Europe, in various languages: 1/ Is it stored close to where it is generated? 2/ Are sharding and replication also close to where it is generated? 3/ How accessible IS that data to someone from the US who speaks one of those languages? 4/ How much is sharding and replication done AWAY from where data is geographically generated? 5/ What if a set of linked documents, from a relational database, has half of it's documents in one language AND related to people/places/or things in one country, and half in another country and it's language. There's a parent record for the two sets.= in the country of the user originating the parent/dual sets. A/ is the parent record replicated in both countries, so that searches finding the child records can easily get to the parent record, vs transatlantic/pacific fetches? B/ Any thoughts about machine translation of said parent record? What are people's thoughts on making sites that cater to people interested in web pages, etc in other countries? Any examples out there? Dennis Gearon Signature Warning ---------------- EARTH has a Right To Life, otherwise we all die. Read 'Hot, Flat, and Crowded' Laugh at http://www.yert.com/film.php