Chances are you have a lot more time on your hands than you normally would. We’ve all been stuck inside for the past month or more and have needed some entertainment. Many have turned to the Internet for that entertainment and while that may not be the best thing for your health (come back for this Wednesday’s post!) it is what is available. There is a lot out there in the vast repository of knowledge that is the Internet, so would it be possible to visit every single website on it?
Is It Possible To Visit Every Website?
To determine that, it is important to know just how many websites there are. There are approximately 1.74 billion websites available on the Internet. That means that you would need to be able to visit about 58 million websites each and every day in a 30 day month like April. There are 86,400 seconds in each day so you would need to visit 672 websites each second in order to visit that full amount in a 24 hour day. No sleep for you.
The good news with that is that not every single website is active as some just have the domain name paid for but nothing built on the site. There are only about 1.3 billion active websites. That means that you would need to visit only 43.3 million websites per day which means only 502 per second. A bit more doable but still a daunting task. Good luck! Hope you have your coffee.
Hold On There!
Now you know that not all of the Internet is skittles and rainbows. There are some dark nooks and crannies of the World Wide Web that polite society avoids. Not all of it is illegal of course but on your journey to visit every website on the web you will certainly come in contact with them.
It is believed that around 4% of all websites on the Internet are pornographic sites. Assuming that there are 1.3 billion active sites on the web that means there are somewhere around 520 million pornographic sites out the in the red light district of the Internet.
On top of that it is estimated that at any given time on the web there 18.5 million sites that are infected with malware. While that number may be a drop in the bucket when compared to the number of websites out there, we hope that your antivirus software is up to date and that you have updated all other software too.
Just How Much Information Is On The Internet?
Now just visiting each website is not enough. You need to consume the information as well. So, how much information is out there on the Internet? In 2019 it was estimated that around 2 zettabytes of information is out there. If you haven’t heard of a zettabyte that is understandable. A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That is one trillion gigabytes and one billion terabytes.
A zettabyte hard drive will not be available to the public anytime soon. Considering terabyte hard drives are just becoming standard for consumers it will be awhile before even a petabyte hard drive is available. A 16 terabyte hard drive is right now top of the line. New technological innovations will be necessary for even a petabyte hard drive to become standard. At the current rate of development it will be almost 2050 before it would be possible and we will need more storage space before then.
Would It Be Possible To Consume All Of The Content On One Website?
So, chances are you are not going to be able to visit every single website, but could you consume all of the content on a website like YouTube? Probably not. In 2018 there were over 5 billion videos on YouTube and in 2020 300 hours of video were being added each minute. If you didn’t start in 2005 when YouTube was founded you are fighting an uphill battle so don’t bother.
Could You Read Every Article On A Website?
Would it be possible to read every article on a website? Assuming that the content is available for free or that you have purchased a subscription it would depend on how much content is added each day. Of course for long standing websites like ESPN or the New York Times that would be a difficult task given how far back the content goes. For something lighter like a personal blog site that might be doable.
But what about something like the Nicely Done Sites’ blog? We have a little over 450 posts on our blog and they take usually at most about 5 minutes to read. It would take you around 2,250 minutes to read all of them or around 37 ½ hours to get through the entire blog. Happy reading and if you do pursue this the lock-down might just be coming to an end when you get to the end!
We know that you very well may have a lot of time on your hands but we don’t think that you have that much time on your hands. While we do encourage you to check out our blog at Nicely Done Sites, we don’t expect you to read every single post. It you have, thank you and we hope that you are at least getting something out of them.