Agreed that it isn’t ideal, but about “awful” specifically - I’m not too sure. I would never ask such a question but I would assume the intent is just to find out how you think and not to get you to spit out a number. Would it be fun if the interviewer worked together with you to approximate it?
Yup that was exactly the case. A fun discussion that involved estimating sizes of web pages, number of web pages, the effect of compression, the effect of deduplication, etc.
