If you could print out the whole Internet, how many pages would it be?
We all understand, courtesy our daily contributions to social media and our search struggles with Google, that the Internet is huge -- and only growing more huge. More than 3 billion people are now online. By the end of 2016, Internet traffic could eclipse one zettabyte a year. But who the heck knows what a zettabyte is?! I want to size the Internet in concrete, physical terms: like, if I printed the whole thing out, I’d have … how many pieces of paper? We can assume there are roughly 47 billion pages on the indexed, searchable Web. The average site came out to 6.5 printed pages. There’s a 95 percent chance that the average length of all Web pages in the world is somewhere between 6.2 and 6.8 printed pages. The number of pages it would take to print the Internet = 305.5 billion. If you printed the Internet, it would be the same length as roughly 212 million copies of Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
If you could print out the whole Internet, how many pages would it be?