1.11.07

Holy World Wide Web Batman


Q: Dear 100 Hour Board:
wow... quick response this time! Here is another one:assuming that one has limitless financial assets and no need to attend to any responsibilities (family, jobs, meal preparation) is there any feasible or possible way for someone to finish the internet up to this point in time before dying?
Regards,
Triple B - aka "Too Much Time on My Hands"

A: Oh my, my, my Triple B,

This is a question you will not like the answer to. Let's start by laying some ground rules too.
First, the world wide web is an architectural program that has no single owner. It is considered a complex engineered system with its own idiosyncrasies and phenomena. Also, there are two portions of the WWW; the surface web and the deep web. The surface web includes only the websites and materials you can readily 'find' by searching. These are sites that are hyperlinked and accessible to webcrawlers used by search engine companies. The vast majority of the web is in the deep web - sites unlinked or protected to access from the casual user. This is a huge world you couldn't even access typically, but let's assume from your 'limitless finances' that you can.
Because no one owns the internet, no one knows precisely how many websites exist. Even in creating this post I create a site. And given programs like Amazon use there are infinite arrangements of websites based on viewing content (I don't think these technically count). The last time this was studied was 2005, when they believed there was 19.2 billion web documents on the surface www. In 2001 they estimated 550 billion documents total. This was included into 108,810,358 webpages
- but I don't think this nearly captures it all. With rough estimates and projections I can put this is the ballpark of about 29.7 billion single web pages now. Roughly. Let's call it 30,000,000,001 with this entry.
If you looked at the webpage an average of 2 seconds per page (a way too quick look given content and that load times will probably be at least double that - but let's assume money buys you instant access) you would need 60 Billion seconds - that's 1 Billion minutes or 16.7 million hours or 694444 days or 1902.6 years. Wow! A little beyond your lifetime or financial abilities.
Now if you want the whole web you are looking at about 1.85 trillion pages - taking about 117250 years. A lot of millenia. So forget about it.
Now it's estimated roughly that pornography is about .5% of the internet - so let's say 149 million sites. That would take 4.8 years to look at at 2 seconds a page. That is doable. A not so noteworthy goal to achieve. What's 4.8 years for an eternity of hell?
Then...if you ask about looking at content - do videos count? I mean must you watch the entire video posted to get credit. Than forget even going through You Tube.
So all in all...no dice, it wouldn't work to get through the internet. But maybe in hell you'll spend it rewriting HTML code for the whole www. (By the way the pic is .0004% of the web content)
I do offer some fun corners of the web:


Just to name a few.


Regards,


Mired in the Web

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