Now, that number deserves a celebration: Our web services have served a billion queries! In detail, the CSI:FingerID web service processed 759 million queries, the CANOPUS web service 228 million, and MSNovelist has 17 million queries. During the last 12 months, 3816 users have processed their data using our web services. Excellent!
Remember when Gangnam Style was the first video on YouTube to hit 1 billion views? That was a big thing in December 2012; we do not expect the same amount of media coverage for our first billion, though. 😉 Indeed, one billion is a big number, and it is really hard to grasp it: See this beautiful video by Tom Scott to “understand” the difference between a million and a billion.
Anyways, many thanks to the team (mainly Markus Fleischauer) who make this possible, and who ensure that everything is running so smoothly! It should not be a surprise that processing 1.18 million queries per day (on average!), is a highly non-trivial undertaking. Auto-scalable, self-healing compute infrastructure and highly optimized database infrastructure are key ingredients for keeping small molecule annotations flowing smoothly to our global community.
PS. The one billion also cover the queries processed by the Bright Giant and their servers, who are offering these services to companies. One counter to rule them all…