How Big is the Internet

In a world dominated by social media it's easy to think the internet is drowning in content contributed by billions of people - this isn't the case.  Your entire social media presence will amount to a few megabytes of data, if you include multimedia and images then it may amount to a few gigabytes at most. 

Take twitter for instance, a tweet at 280 characters at 4 bytes per character equates to 1,120 bytes per tweet, or 1.12 Kilobytes.  If you have 40,000 tweets that's 44.8 Megabytes of data, excluding the images.  With 7 billion people in the world say 100 MB per profile on average, that equates to approximately 700 Petabytes [700 million Gigabytes] of data.  That might sound like a lot but when you consider there are around 52 billion webpages [at the time of writing] the amount of data those social media accounts amount to is minuscule. 

Researchers have tried to calculate the size of the internet many times but as it is forever expanding it's rather difficult to pin down.  You also rely on someone or something to have indexed it all, and as omniscient as we like to think Google is, its index only accounts for a small fraction of the internet, the bulk of the internet isn't indexed and can't be reached by search engines.  In other words you have to know it's there and where it is in order to find it.  At the time of writing for instance Google's index stands at 52 billion web pages.

Current estimates put the size of the internet at around 1.1 to 2.2 Zettabytes [1.1 trillion Gigabytes] of data.  These are based on approximations and assumptions about the type of data that that is stored, coupled with information about the total volume of traffic that passes through ISPs per month.  For YouTube alone, 1 hour of video is uploaded every second to YouTube.

The fact that only a small section of the internet is indexed is fascinating and also scary.  It's fascinating like the Universe itself the largest part of its composition being unknown.  It's scary in terms of the potential for what that unknown contains.  The "deep web" and "dark web" are terms often used to describe it.  Some of its content has come to light over the years as containing all manner of content that is illegal and illicit.  This type of content exists on the surface web too though, and only makes up a small percentage of its content, so the question is how much of the deep web is disturbing and how much of it would people actually want to explore?

Like the Universe itself there's a fascination to know what's out there, but if our imagination when it comes to science fiction as to what the universe may hold is anything to go by, we might not want to know the answer to that question.