1,000,000,000,000 Pages on the Web

I heard this weekend that there are now over 1 Trillion pages on the world wide web. According to The Official Google Blog...

"We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!"

Wow! I can't really comprehend that big of a number. But the real question isn't how many pages are on the internet, but rather how many of them are useful to YOU. The good news is, there's no need to waste hours and hours scouring the web to find relevant content.

Thanks to RSS readers like Google Reader, NetNewsWire, and Bloglines you can now bring the web's best content to you. It's like having your own personal newspaper version of the internet. Pretty cool.

So to all the web designers, bloggers, journalists, comedians, and other content creators please keep it coming! Here's looking forward to a quadrillion pages.


In other news, according to The New York Times China now surpasses the U.S. in number of internet users.