The Problem: The Web is big. Really big.
In 2009, Google engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google’s most recent index had found over a trillion unique URLs throughout the World Wide Web:
Even after removing [duplicate websites], we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! 🙂
Needless to say, someone must take this burden upon themselves.
My Task: To Annotate Every Web Page
How do I plan on keeping up with the billions of new pages being added to the web daily? As I see it, there are three possible outcomes:
1. I continue to post regularly until I’m old and weary, at which point I choose an heir to continue my journey. This will happen around 2070, by when the world’s population will have stabilized at 10 billion and the rate of new internet content production will have plateaued. My heir will repeat the process, and within several hundred generations (give or take a few orders of magnitude) the entire world wide web will be annotated at this URL.
2. I continue to post regularly until I’m old and weary, at which point artificial intelligence comes to fruition and completes my task in a matter of seconds. I retire to a cabin in the woods while the rest of the human race tries to figure out why their new supercomputer’s ‘off’ button isn’t working.
3. I continue to post regularly until I’m old and weary, at which point a coronal mass ejection, supervolcano eruption, nuclear war, or other catastrophic event destroys the majority of the world’s internet infrastructure, making my job much easier.
There is also a fourth option…
4. I will never finish annotating the internet.
…but that seems very unlikely.