And not only Google.

For many years after I'd moved to Israel, and had become a vegetarian, my mother continued to inform me how many millions of hamburgers were reported as having been served by McDonald's. I can't say that I really cared, but there was something fascinating in that continually mushrooming number. It wasn't necessarily a sign of progress - perhaps I saw it more as a sign of the inevitable subjection of an already non-existent folk culture to a mass-produced blandness. Whatever, I kept tabs on those numbers. On our last trip to North America, however, I noticed that although some of the McDonald's stands we passed did display an "over ... served" sign (amazingly, it was over 99 billion), the vast majority of them didn't. They too had realized that at those proportions, the number loses any real meaning.

I'm apparently not the only person to have been (okay, only slightly) obsessed with this number. This photograph is from January of 2006, suggesting that the number was "stuck" there well before I saw one of those signs. An interesting page from 2000 on a web site I've never encountered before gives further evidence that 99 billion was a number reached even well before then. A short thread on kottke.org from November, 2003, sheds some light on the issue as well:

jojo says:
I just drove by a McDonalds and their tote board is up to "99 billion served."

dowingba says:
It's been at 99 billion served for like 10 years now. My theory is that they're easily over the 100 billion mark now but it would be too costly to modify all the signs to include that extra digit.

I really don't know.

Go to: Holding on / Letting go.