{"id":1351,"date":"2008-07-31T23:34:54","date_gmt":"2008-08-01T03:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=1351"},"modified":"2008-07-31T23:41:38","modified_gmt":"2008-08-01T03:41:38","slug":"the-web-is-um-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/31\/the-web-is-um-big\/","title":{"rendered":"The Web is&#8230; um&#8230; big."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2008\/07\/Internet_map_1024.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\" title=\"The Internet\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2008\/07\/_Internet_map_1024.jpg\" title=\"The Internet\" alt=\"The Internet\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As I seem to be saying a lot this month, I&#8217;ve been using the Internet for a long time. I remember when <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gopher_(protocol)\">Gopher<\/a> was more useful than <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol\">HTTP<\/a>. I remember when with a little dedication you could surf a significant portion of the entire web. I mean, I&#8217;m not <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tim_Berners-Lee\">Berners-Lee<\/a> or anything, but I started on the web about three years after he did<footnote>And, let&#8217;s be clear about this I was using the Internet long before I started on the web&#8211;between Gopher and FTP and Usenet and&#8230; well, you get the point. And don&#8217;t even get me started on GEnie, Fidonet, local BBSes, etc. I feel 100 years old.<\/footnote>, and there was definitely a time when I had seen more than half of the pages in the Big Cloud.<\/p>\n<p>That, it should go without saying, was a long time ago.<\/p>\n<p>This week <a href=\"http:\/\/googleblog.blogspot.com\/2008\/07\/we-knew-web-was-big.html\">Google announced that their index contains a trillion pages<\/a>. A trillion. <\/p>\n<p>Let me put that in context for you: if you spent one second on each page, looking at a trillion web pages would take you over 30,000 years. That&#8217;s no sleep, and no bathroom breaks. No human is going to ever see even a small portion of the current web. Forget about the tremendous masses of information that are added every day. Sure, there&#8217;s probably a million pages of <a href=\"http:\/\/scalzi.com\/whatever\/004457.html\">photos of bacon taped to a cat<\/a>, etc, but still, a <em>trillion<\/em> pages.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and in case you&#8217;re somehow blas&eacute; about that trillion pages number&#8230; don&#8217;t forget that what Google indexes is the surface web, and everyone says the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Deep_Web\">Deep Web<\/a> is <em>several orders of magnitude<\/em> bigger than the surface. Several orders of magnitude bigger than a trillion pages. Chew on that for a minute.<\/p>\n<p>(<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Image:Internet_map_1024.jpg\">More information on the image above<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">As I seem to be saying a lot this month, I&#8217;ve been using the Internet for a long time. I remember when Gopher was more useful than HTTP. I remember when with a little dedication you could surf a significant portion of the entire web. I mean, I&#8217;m not Berners-Lee or anything, but I started on the web about three&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/31\/the-web-is-um-big\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[101,324,268],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-aging","tag-internet","tag-visualization","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-lN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1356,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions\/1356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}