Size of the Internet

How big is the Internet? It's a difficult question to tackle-- the Internet as a whole isn't owned or moderated by any one body. First of all, let's measure size by amount of information. As it so happens, a Dutchman named Maurice de Kunder has attempted to answer this question of size, and his results, while inevitably inaccurate, can be found here.

What I found most interesting was some of de Kunder's methods. As far as I understood it, one procedure was to determine the frequency of certain words in a huge sample of text. The example given was the word 'the' being found in 67.61% of pages. The word 'the' is then searched in Google or another search engine, and the number of pages found can be divided by the percentage (converted to decimal), giving the total number of pages out there.

I can't think of a more fascinating way to statistically measure the Internet, so I'll go ahead and take a philosophical view. If we define the size of the Internet as '1', that is to say, the sum total of information on the Internet, the size of any individual page becomes effectively nothing. In this way, the information added to the Internet doesn't increase the size of the Internet, but the insignificance of all other information on the Internet. If you take this idea to its extreme, the point at which the Internet contained all information in the universe, an infinite amount of data (consider the digits of pi), would be the moment it ceases to exist, each page having a significance of zero, and the sum of an infinite number of zeroes being zero.

With that begins the game of 'find the flaw in logic'. Isn't the Internet an interesting thing?