Assessing the size of the internet is difficult due to its distributed nature and different metrics used. Around 1 billion people used the internet in 2008, with 500 million using it weekly. The internet is estimated to occupy 5 million terabytes of data, with Google indexing only 0.04%. There are around 155 million websites, but the number fluctuates, and other metrics such as server numbers and traffic are difficult to measure. One way to conceive its size is through the weight of energy used to move one byte of information, which is two ounces according to Russell Seitz.
Assessing the size of the Internet is a somewhat difficult proposition, as it is a distributed body and there is no complete index of it. What we mean by asking how big the Internet is also plays into how we answer the question. We mean how many people use the internet? How many websites are there on the internet? How many bytes of data are on the Internet? How many separate servers operate on the Internet? How much traffic passes on the Internet per second? All of these different metrics could be used to address the size of the internet, but they are all very different.
Perhaps the simplest metric is simply how many people use the internet. This can be seen as the population of the internet, and thus would seem like a decent indicator of its size. Many different companies try to measure internet usage, from Nielsen Ratings to the Office of the CIA to Serverwatch. The general answer seems to be that just over a billion people used the internet in 2008. Of these, around 500 million use the internet at least once a week, making them more or less permanent citizens of the internet population.
It may be that what most people mean when they ask about the size of the internet is how many bytes it occupies. Making an estimate is a difficult enough task, but one person made an estimate not too long ago and can probably be trusted to have a good idea. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the world’s largest internet index, estimated the size at about 5 million terabytes of data. That’s over 5 billion gigabytes of data, or 5 trillion megabytes. Schmidt further noted that in its seven years of operation, Google has indexed about 200 terabytes, or 0.04% of the total size.
There are thought to be around 155 million websites on the Internet, but this number fluctuates wildly from month to month, and one runs into a problem as to what exactly constitutes a website. Is a person’s individual Facebook page their own website? How about their LiveJournal or blog? What if the blog is hosted by a blogging service?
Other metrics for internet size have trouble finding reasonable numbers on them. People estimate that there are around 75 million servers worldwide, but this number could be as low as a factor of five. The traffic that crosses the Internet in a single day might seem easy to measure, but in reality it is very difficult to find a reliable collection of this data, due to the huge amount of computers, servers and countries involved.
Perhaps the best way to conceive something as inconceivable as the size of the Internet is to follow the example of Russell Seitz. He took estimates for the size and traffic of the entire Internet and used them with the weight of the energy used to move one byte of information. While tiny individually, over trillions and trillions of bytes it slowly added up. How big is the internet? According to Russel Seitz: two ounces.
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