Sunday, August 19, 2018

130 Trillion Web Pages

A vital principle that I learned in college was not to know all the data or read every book. The solution was to know where to find needed information.

A library in the Renaissance era might have contained upward of 1,000 books. It was feasible for a learned person to have read all of those tomes and literary pieces.

In my college years, a large library would contain 100,000 books. If one had the luxury or reading ten books a day, seven days a week, it would take 27 years to read the entire library. It was impossible to read all the books.

In 2016, the search engine Google reported that there were 130+ trillion web pages. It would take 130 billion days, at 1,000 pages a day, to read them all. That comes to 356+ million years of reading.

The impossibility of reading everything has multiplied to the absurd.