How big is the internet?
News, Australia - internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking.
But just how big is it?
Microsoft's Bing team puts the amount of web pages at "over one trillion".
And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses.
There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.
That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.
Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you'd be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep. . .
Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.
"Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet. . . The largest internet population belongs to China, which claimed this week to have more users online – 338 million - than there were people in the US.
However InternetWorldStats.com a website that combines multiple data sources, claims China's online population is more like 298 million, just a few million shy of overtaking the US population. . .
Measuring the online population can be tricky. There are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. It's an epic-scale guessing game using a series of sources to get just one number.
IWS combines data from the UN's International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.
Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.
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