August 08, 2008 | Friday
Six (Big) Internet Numbers (and We Mean Big!)
By James Lowery - SEO Strategist in Search Engines |SEO
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the Internet is big, very big. You might think that the amount of data on your hard drive is pretty overwhelming, but when it comes to the numbers related to the Web as a whole, it’s as tiny and insignificant as a walk to the local shop compared to a trip to the moon.
To put the size of the Web in perspective, check out these big Internet numbers making the news in the last couple of weeks…
1 Million – The estimated number of servers used by Google
Google use a range of different types of machines to provide their search and other services. In an effort to keep their power bills low, new Google data centres are situated in areas like Oregon in order to take advantage of custom-built wind power stations. Regardless, it’s still thought that the company spends more than $200 Million per year on electricity – or around half the total amount spent by UK households!
250 Million – The number of Internet users in China
The Beijing Olympics start this week, and the stunning “bird’s nest” stadium has a seating capacity of 91,000, which means that it could be filled more than 2,747 times over by Chinese Internet users. Alternately, this large number of Internet users would fill around 500,000 Airbus A380 Super Jumbo Planes – Imagine the queue at baggage reclaim after those flights…
3 Billion – The number of UK searches in June 2008 (Comscore)
Apparently the average query is around 15 characters long, which means that working solidly, a good typist would be able to get through all of these queries in around 11 and a half years.
120 Billion – The number of pages indexed by Cuil
If each of these Web pages was printed out on a single sheet of A4 paper, it would create a stack approximately 9,720km tall, or enough to wallpaper half of all the counties in Ireland. Of course, it would take a while to print out all that information: the latest inkjet printers can manage around 60 pages per minute, which means that printing a hard copy of the whole Cuil index would take around 3,802 years. It’s worth saying that if a gust of wind blew this stack of papers over, it would probably provide a set of results just as accurate as Cuil does.
1 Trillion – The number of items “known about” by Google
By comparison, the British Library has around 150,000,000 items in its index, or about one six thousandth of that amount. Statistics show that around 94% of the volume of the Internet is “junk”, which means that the amount of “useful” stuff in Google is around 60 billion items: enough for roughly 10 useless facts for every man woman and child on earth.
1 Googol – Enough said
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
(10 duotrigintillion or 10 thousand sexdecillion)
Google’s name comes from a misspelling of this word (oh, the days before being able to check spellings online). One googol is more than the total number of atoms in the observable universe.
Comments
#1
Great post here guys, lol loving the one about 94% of the internet is junk, soo true!