Assessing the size of the Internet is quite a difficult proposition as it is a distributed body and there is no comprehensive index of it. What we mean by asking how big the internet is also influences how we answer the question. Do we mean how many people use the Internet? How many websites are there on the Internet? How many bytes of data are there on the Internet? How many different servers operate on the Internet? How much traffic goes through the Internet per second? All of these different metrics could be used to deal with the size of the internet, but they are all very different.
An ADSL modem, a way to connect to the Internet.
Perhaps the simplest metric is simply how many people use the Internet. This can be seen as the population of the internet, and therefore seems to be 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.
Blogs make up a large percentage of the Internet.
It may be that what most people mean when they question the size of the Internet is how many bytes it takes up. Estimating this is quite a difficult task, but one person did an estimate not too long ago that can probably be trusted to have a good idea. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, the world’s largest Internet index, estimated the size at about 5 million terabytes of data. That’s more than 5 billion gigabytes of data, or 5 trillion megabytes. Schmidt further noted that in its seven years of operations, Google has indexed around 200 terabytes of that, or 0.004% of the total size.
A gigabyte can contain information equivalent to about 1,000 thick books.
It is believed that there are about 155 million websites on the Internet, but that number varies greatly from month to month, and one has the problem of knowing what exactly constitutes a website. Is a person’s individual Facebook page their own website? What about your 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 that number could be a factor of five. The traffic that passes through the Internet in a single day may seem easy to measure, but it is actually very difficult to find a reliable collection of this data, due to the large number of computers, servers and countries involved.
Perhaps the best way to conceive of something as inconceivable as the size of the Internet is to follow the lead of Russell Seitz. He made estimates of the size and traffic of the entire Internet and used them as the weight of the energy used to move one byte of information. Although individually small, more than trillions and trillions of bytes were slowly added. How big is the Internet? According to Russell Seitz: two ounces.
Acoustic couplers, which send and receive computer data over telephone lines, predate modern modem technology in the early days of Internet use.
