I've just done a Google search for my own name. It produced 425 hits
in 0.24 seconds, culled from 3,083,324,652 web pages. Very impressive.

But what's going to happen in 50 years time?

How many web pages are predicted and what effect will there be on
search times, assuming no revolutionary improvements in technology?

Hi probonopublic,

Good day and thanks for your question. Its nice to see that you're
enjoying this service.

Google is indeed an amazing search engine, and the fact that it can
unearth pages from its 3+ billion pages database, in a matter of
miliseconds is truly astonishing.

As far as how will the situation be in 50 years, no one can say. Maybe
we may not have computers, we may have robots. The internet might
collapse. Or, I may be proved wrong, and internet will be a total
wireless affair with speeds of 1 Ybps (Yottabits per second). 1
yottabit = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bits

Lets look at a realistic situation though. Lets assume that there are
negligible changes in the next 50 yrs (thought it seems highly
unlikely)

When Google's working prototype went public, it had only around 25
million pages. The following are the stats of the number of pages over
the months (taken from http://web.archive.org)
Nov 1998 - ~ 25,000,000
Jul 2000 - 1,060,000,000 web pages
Oct 2000 - 1,247,340,000 web pages
Jan 2001 - 1,326,920,000 web pages
Apr 2001 - 1,326,920,000 web pages
Jul 2001 - 1,326,920,000 web pages
Oct 2001 - 1,610,476,000 web pages
Feb 2002 - 2,073,418,204 web pages
Nov 2002 - 3,083,324,652 web pages

As you can see from the above.... it took nearly 2 years to index the
first 1 billion pages. The next billion took approximately 1.5 years.
The third billion was indexed within 9 months (half the time required
for the second billion)

The rate at which things are going (and the internet expanding), 4
billion pages will be indexed by Feb 2003 !

50 years from now.....2052.......Google may actually land up having 1
googol of pages an justify the name of their engine.

1 googol = 10 raised to the power of 100

OR

1 followed by 100 zeros

OR

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

As far as time is concerned, I don't see it reducing. No doubt, the
speed of the search engine will increase, but with the number of pages
increasing too, the total time required to unearth results may not
change.

I hope you agree with me. If you have any clarifications, please don't
hesitate to ask.

Thanks for using this service once again

Warm regards,
aditya2k

Hi, Aditya2k

A perfect answer!

But, if you've got it wrong, then I shall expect my $2 back ...

Be warned, I shall keep checking.

Kindest regards

Bryan

Well, I would say that search times would only get faster, because
even though in 50 years there will be more website, keeping in mind
that some will not be around as well, the search technologies and
power behind them will have multiplied far more.

My humble opin...

Since computers were hardly a commen item to think about, let alone
consider using, 50 years ago, it would be hard to predict the use of
web sites and searches 50 years from now. Likely the entire context of
the question would be invalid in 50 years, as some other radically new
way of presenting and searching for information will be invented.

It is very hard to assume no revolutionary improvements in technology in 50 years.