100 Trillion Words on the Net

"Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, gave an interesting speech about the meaning and power of all of the data that Google is collecting. I was floored by a fact he threw out. His educated guess is that the Internet is the repository of more than 100 trillion words. After the speech, I asked him how much it is growing. He said that it is growing about 10 percent to 20 percent a month. Some parts of it, however, are dying, so the net growth rate is less than that."

A 100 Trillion Words on the Internet; An Afternoon at Google Developer Day
by Dean Takahashi
http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/2007/05/31/a-100-trillion-words-on-the-internet-an-afternoon-at-google-developer-day/