Google says that they have just indexed their one trillionth unique URL.
It’s hard to imagine a trillion. At FlickrCC, there are only 20 pictures tagged “trillion”. It’s a mystery how they earned that tag. I visited photographer Chris Jordan’s site. Chris takes pictures that give a sense of the scale of numbers — how many people have been arrested and held in the “war on terror” (83,000) or how many plastic bottles are used in the US every five minutes (2 million), for example. Chris doesn’t have any pictures that give you a sense of what a trillion might look like.
And of course, the number doesn’t say anything about the content of all those places we visit online. For example, Wikipedia is there, the encyclopedia that nuclear physicists and my fifth-grader can contribute to. There’s the Periodic Table of Videos and the Puzzle Farter. There are millions of pictures (one of my favourites) and videos of lofty paper airplanes. How many LOL cats are there? Google itself is there.
One trillion. Hard to imagine. One trillion and growing.
