Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence, which means the Internet’s collective brain has more neurons than our actual gray matter that’s stuffed between our ears.
“The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons,” Kelly writes in his 2010 book “What Technology Wants.”
With a $1 million grant from Google, a group called the World Wide Web Foundation — appropriately founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty much created the Internet — is on a quest to figure out, with some degree certainty, how big the Internet really is.
The WWWF (not to be confused with the WWF) said of their project:
“The Web Index will be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed and developing countries, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries.”
The implications are huge. In addition to determining the size of the internet, they are going to look at social implications and overall impact.