On the Google blog, Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj posted an article today called "We knew the web was big..." which indicates Google engineers recently noted that the number of web pages on the Internet passed the one-trillion mark. That's 1,000,000,000,000 pages. For those who don't process the impact of adding that many groups of zeros at a time, think about this:

  • Take 1,000 pages.
  • Multiply that 1,000 times and think about just how big that is.
  • Multiply that amount another thousand times, and stop to think about how big that is.
  • Now, again take that huge amount and multiply it by 1,000. Now you're at a trillion pages.

That's freakin' huge, really. If you started counting from one to a trillion and counted one number per second, it would take you almost 317 centuries before you were done (and by the way I asked google to help me figure that out). That's almost 32,000 years. It almost completely boggles the mind. That's a lot of web pages.

Google also notes that every day, the number of pages on the web increases by several billion.

Alpert and Hajaj have another explanation to try to explain the sheer size of the Internet today:

Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

That's really just amazing to me. Wow. And now you know why we call this the Information Age. A lot of that information may be inaccurate, pornographic or otherwise useless, but some of it's good, and the sheer immensity of it is truly awesome.

TechCrunch has a slightly different take, calling the Google post misleading. The end of the TechCrunch post alludes to some news coming next week that might turn Internet indexing on it's head. Interesting - Is there some big search engine news in the works? Is it Microsoft's BrowseRank or something else? Stay tuned.