How Big Is the Internet?

It’s a well-known fact that the search engines are indexing only a small part of the entire Internet content.

But what is the Internet’s exact size, especially since the 2005 boom has added 17 million new sites?

In his speech at the annual conference of the National Advertisers Association, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, said that, from the data recorded by the search engine, it seems that, at this specific moment, the Internet is made up of 5 million terabytes.

Even Google, which is considered currently the best search engine ever, has succeeded to index only 170 terabytes up until now, Schmidt said.

Google has been indexing information for 7 years, and if you want to have an idea on how fast this process is, it seems that, in order to index the 5 million terabytes of data, the search engine would need 300 years. And this would be valid only if nobody posted new content on the Internet...

It would be interesting to find out how much are the other search engines indexing compared to Google, so we can have a complete image of what is currently accessible.


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