The Digital Web Universe
One of the recurrent questions in my blog is : how big is the Document Universe, whether paper or digital ? Mankind now has the Paper Universe (somewhat) under control, and we are moving towards the “Less Paper Office“. The Digital Universe, on the contrary, is still growing at an incredible pace.
A subset of this Digital Universe is the web, this huge collection of readily available documents. Google posted its own estimate for the number of “pages” on the Internet: at least a trillion pages, increasing by several billions a day.
Although it is not as obvious an impact on our environment as paper consumption, we need to put a leash on this information explosion. The impact on the environment is not cut trees or transportation, but that information needs to be stored, accessible through high speed networks, and indexed / searched.
Not to mention the time wasted by knowledge workers finding relevant (or often irrelevant…) information. Some estimate that Google, one of the best indexing engine, only has 40 billion pages indexed. That’s a needle in the haystack… yet search is stillextremely difficult!
Hopefully semantic web and documents will help make sense of that data.
