With nothing better to do on a Friday,i tried to calculate the total weight of the world wide web aka the internet.
I checked the major search engines such as ask.com,msn,google and yahoo.On the average in July 2009 the total number of web pages cataloged by the search engines is 24 billion.That means there are 24000000000 web pages in the world.Now lets see if we print all this on paper,how much it will weigh.An average A4 size paper weighs 5 grams.So we need 24 billion A4 size pages to print all web pages.
24000000000/1000/1000 X 5 equals 120,000 tons.That does not include the weight of the printing ink.By that calculation the internet weighs 120,000 tons (if my maths is right).
A typical UK truck can carry 44 tons by law. We will need 2728 trucks to carry the internet.
Now we can calculate the length of the internet.A typical UK truck with trailer is 13.5 meters long,and a line of all the trucks carrying internet will be 36828 meters or 22.9 miles long.
Or if we make a line of 24 billion individual A4 size pages,treating each as a web page after printing the contents of individual webpages on each of them,we will end up with a line 7128000 km(as each A4 size paper is 297 mm) long or 4 429 133.86 miles.Thats about 4.5 million miles and thats about 9 round trips to the moon(again,if my maths is right :>> ).