So How Huge Exactly Is 1 Trillion Pages Online?

I've just bumped into a post on official Google blog that announces a significant milestone for the search engine, i.e. a total of 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) indexed pages. And I could not help but mention it here - after all, even if this is not such a big event and every long-term blog owner contributes a few thousand of unique pages to the amount, it is still amazing when you come to think of it.

The number of pages in Google's index has grown at an amazing rate - while it started with 26 million pages in 1998, they reached one billion by 2000 and today we see a totally new figure with twelve zeroes in it.

The new technologies and their penetration has enabled absolutely any web user (without any knowledge of HTML) can generate dozens and hundreds of pages almost without doing anything unusual - simply by creating profiles on various social networks and using a number of internet applications frequently (now imagine how many pages FriendFeed or Twitter have).

With the current growth of Google index at the rate of several billion new pages per day it is wise to start looking forward to the next milestone. Unfortunately, without knowing exactly how many billions of new pages are indexed every day, I can not predict when Google will actually reach the figure "googol" (one followed by one hundred of zeros) but I do think it is possible.

Now, while we can not predict how long it will take to index this huge number of pages, we can still make some interesting conclusions. So suppose you are a web user who wants to visit every single page Google indexed online. If the goal is so ambitious, you are not supposed to stay on each site for long - probably 10 seconds will be perfectly enough. So if you pay 10 seconds of your attention to each and every site, it will take you 115,740,740 days or 317,097 years to visit all of them. So no chances any of us will manage to find absolutely all the content in one lifetime. But hopefully no one will find reasons enough to even start such an experiment.