Sastri's talented multitudes reside on the servers of HelloBrain.com, an "intellectual capital exchange" in Santa Clara, California, where high-tech companies post engineering projects and freelance engineers around the world bid on the work.

FORBES: Hello brain. Good-bye rules.

According to Ingersoll, Twitter search is powered by Lucene, handling more than a billion queries a day, with close to four hundred million tweets indexed and available within 50 milliseconds of being posted (see here for a 2010 post about Lucene by the Twitter engineering team).

FORBES: LucidWorks: Bringing Search to Big Data

"Even if you did identify the 50 or 100 people who did year-2000 work, you need to devote a significant chunk of money until it becomes exorbitantly expensive, " says Jeanne Koch, a systems manager in the systems and engineering department at The Washington Post, in Washington.

CNN: Managers turn away from retention bonuses for Y2K