The Growth of the Web

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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*From Internet World Stats

The Internet is growing at a fantastic pace especially in Asia.  How can we visualize what's happening?

It's clear that information growth can be measured in a number of ways.  The above statistics show it in terms of population and penetration.  We've presented this before.  If you examine the chart, it shows that there is a 74.2% penetration in North America, while the growth rate is highest in the Middle East and Africa.

But what about the information itself?  How can we visualize it?  It's just not people using Internet Browsers.  We need to examine content and traffic.

One way to do it is to think about it as scattered about a 'landscape'.  It's not uniformly distributed.  In some regions it is a desert with little information, but in others, it is like a congested spider's web with the information piled up around servers.

Looking closer, information appears to be just like cells in a live object, some growing almost out of control and others disappearing.  A link once there no longer is valid.  The information has died.

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Looking closer still, we see that information grows each second, minute and hour.   People cut out links that once were live or they don't pay their bills.  There are many reasons for information loss, but the trajectory is for tremendous growth.  It's exponential.

The big push is to improve search engines so that Google, Bing, Yahoo and others can answer more complex questions.  We also need faster and faster web crawlers and connections.

So the Internet can be thought of as a pulsing dynamic body that grows new 'cells' all the time, but loses some on the way.  The ability of the search engines to index and store the links to the information has to keep ahead of the demand for growth.  If it does not, then t Internet would spiral down as an information source.

We have to remember that not every piece of information on the Internet is known to Google.

The memory technology has to keep growing, so a good investment would be in a broad based memory technology.  We need a breakthrough about every two years in cost and size of memory.