technology

Steady Rise of the Information Age

ComScore, a leading source of Internet trends and statistics, reports that for the month of February 2008 there were roughly 9.9 billion searches made in the U.S.. They claim this refers to Americans at "Home/Work/University Locations" but it probably also includes users on mobile devices. It's not entirely transparent if this also includes users of the Google API's that can be based on automated systems. But even if it is, it's still a mighty big number of things that are being searched. Actually, put in perspective, it amounts to about 1.3 searches per American per day. Roughly 60% of those searches occurred on Google. Also, there is a rate of increase of approximately 1% per month.

I wonder how many printed book pages your average American reads a day. Is it one page? It might be a slightly different story if we included pages of online books, or digital books, or even newspapers online and offline, etc.. But even then, if you are looking for specific information why read a book when you can search for the topic by keyword and glance through some small excerpt. You get to skip all that extra(neous) information.