Bing’s data-capture scale made it profitable for the first time in 2015

Evidence

Bing’s search engineering team built its own model of the digital and physical world with a technology it calls Satori: a self-learning system that is adding 28,000 DVDs of content every day. According to the project’s senior director, “It’s mind-blowing how much data we have captured over the last couple of years. The line would extend to Venus and you would still have 7 trillion pixels left over.” All those pixels were being put to good use. In its October 2015 earnings call, the company announced that Bing had become profitable for the first time, thanks to around $1 billion in search ad revenue from the previous quarter. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 507

Categorization

• CANDY: The line-to-Venus-with-7-trillion-pixels-left-over image is a fun, tweetable corporate boast that lands without needing context.
• XREF: connects to: Data capture for profit is a recent, quality-of-life-altering development — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 38