There is a truly mind-boggling amount of information out there on the web. Apparently Google’s index is thought to contain more than a hundred trillion words, and is being added to at a rate of about 10-20% a month (although parts of it are dying off, so the actual growth rate is somewhat smaller.) This is around a thousand terabytes of information.

To put this into perspective, the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress, with more than 134 million items, including 20 million catalogued books, 60 million manuscripts, 4.8 million maps and 12.5 million photographs. It’s estimated that the text held in the library (ignoring all the maps, photographs and illustrations) would constitute around 20 terabytes of information.

Currently, the English Wikipedia alone has over 1,850,703 articles, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceeds the English Wikipedia in size, giving a combined total of more than 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages. The English Wikipedia alone has over 609 million words. (more…)

July 25th, 2007 | Web Content | 1 comment