Search Engines & the Human Brain

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all (Web) links really are. There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That’s a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. (Data from Kevin Kelly's New York Times article, Scan This Book!)

One trillion links on the Web! That’s similar to the number of synapses in the brain. In fact, as more knowledge finds its way onto the Web, it begins to resemble the human brain more and more. Think of this. As the number of Web pages increases, will the Web become the repository of all human knowledge; a “universal library?” If so, it would be a monumental human achievement.

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Digitized Media Statistics

Humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV Shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. This material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, all the media could be compressed (at current technology rates) onto 50 petabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000 byte) hard disks.

Corporations and libraries are scanning about a million books per year. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.

Statistics from Kevin Kelly's New York Times article, Scan This Book!

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Living the Long Tail

“Lightning Source is living the Long Tail now,” according to J. Kirby Best, Lightning Source’s CEO. Print-on-Demand (POD) is expanding the market rather than cannibalizing it. Best estimates that 720,000 books out of some 1.1 million surveyed fit Lightning Source’s current manufacturing capabilities.

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