Creative interview questions for consultancy companies and technology giants such as Google are nothing new. In fact the most commonly used of them are almost obsolete now and their “correct answers” are widespread. In fact one should definitely
google them
before going to Google’s interview. 
Questions such as How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? (obviously the market hourly rate or slightly above) or standard Fermi questions such as How many golf balls fit in a school bus? have a common solving pattern as far as a phone interview goes.
However, the popular question How long would it take to sort 1 trillion numbers? now has a very easy answer – 1 minute. The Hadoop project (led by Apache and Yahoo!) managed to benchmark a Petabyte sort in 16 hours, sorting a 1 Terabyte in 62 seconds. It seems that Yahoo! is very serious about bringing Hadoop to become the cloud computing platform. Yahoo’s strategy is to invest and lead the core developement of what is otherwise a free and open source project. They will eventually fully reap fruit and benefit once it really takes off and becomes the widespread standard for distributed applications/MapReduce framework. It will be interesting to follow how Google will actually respond and whether they would, at some later point in time share freely parts of their proprietary BigTable/MapReduce/GFS frameworks just to establish market share there too.
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