3.31.2012

Download the Web?!

Wow this is an ambitious project - apparently this company offers a download of the entire Web!

I guess it's not as huge as you might think though - here's one of the FAQ's on the site:


Q: Isn't the Web too big for anyone to be able to download it?A: If we consider the whole World Wide Web, yes it would be time-consuming to download it. Recent statistics from Google estimate that there are approximately 74.3 billion pages on the Web. If we assume that each page has 10.4 Kb on average, that is already 673,200,000,000 Kb, or 673.2 Terabytes (Tb)! 
Our detailed review, however, has found that 92% of those websites are pornographic or gambling related. Once we removed these, the size of the Web is reduced to 8% of the initial volume, eg 62.8Tb. 
As a next step we eliminated the illegal MP3 and movie files as well as the distracting YouTube videos. This further reduced the size of the Web to 3,444 Tb, which is the size of our file collection.

I think they meant 3.444 Tb though, in that last section. Anyway, I'm really not sure who would want that... but I guess they're getting some business somehow.

You probably are wondering what I was wondering... What about blogs, etc that update frequently? Well, apparently they have "update CD's" to download every day... Not sure how this integrates with the rest of it but I guess maybe they have some sort of management system to sort of add it in to the original files.

The things people come up with these days... :P


Update: apparently there are a significant number of people that want it, cause the downloads are disabled right now due to bandwidth issues. Oh well, guess I won't be able to get my copy of the web just yet... ;)


1 comment:

Jonathan Gerrans said...

Sadly, no one seems to have been very surprised by this - perhaps it was taken at face value by the 12 people who read it. In reality, this is an APRIL FOOLS JOKE!! :)
I found this a couple weeks ago - someone else created the site and used it for his own April Fools joke a year or two ago, and I reused it. One of these years I'm going to get back to my own original ideas. Anyway, downloading the internet is a preposterous idea; it's not 93% porn and gambling, and surely would be much larger than 3.444 Tb. There are many other things wrong with that idea, but that should give you enough to go on.

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