I’m fascinated by the sheer vastness of the universe with its interconnection of galaxies, planets, suns and moons, and after watching Horizon’s programme ‘Infinity’ last week I couldn’t help being drawn back into this ultimately mind aching thought process. If space is expanding, into what is it expanding and just how big is it exactly?
Just as the universe is expanding, so too is the web. It’s an enormous and continually growing mass of interconnected static and dynamic websites with communities and links that bind it all together. Here’s a visualisation of the web universe. Attempts to figure out how big exactly are probably as difficult as calculating the size of the universe, well almost. Google had found 1 trillion URLs by the end of 2009, and the ‘WayBackMachine’ that archives most of the net has 2 ‘quadrillion’ bytes of information consisting of just regular pages that exclude, for instance, video content.
In the beginning Yahoo! was able to index most of what was important on the web in its directory of links, but it was never going to be able to cope with the tide of people and information that surged to it over the late 1990’s and since. Not only are organisations moving their content and records online for people to access, but users are increasingly contributing their own content. We’re all authors now, which is incredible. Our day to day lives recorded for posterity.
