Study: Digital universe and its impact bigger than we thought

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9067639

I wasn't expecting data to grow THAT fast. According to this article, "By 2011, there will be 1,800 exabytes of electronic data in existence, or 1.8 zettabytes (an exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes). In fact, the number of bits stored already exceeds the estimated number of stars in the universe, IDC stated. And because data is growing by a factor of 10 every five years, by 2023 the number of stored bits will surpass Avogadro's number, which is the number of carbon atoms in 12 grams, or 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.022 x 10^23)."

!!! Looks like we are already flying way past petabytes (or 1 thousand gigabytes). When you think about all the possible electronic information on the web it makes sense that there is so much content already found electronically. You have the daily online market exchanges that investors regularly use, you have constant direct, ftp, and peer to peer download transactions, you have businesses that take advantage of an electronic infrastructure to improve the productivity of their businesses, and you have a lot of websites in just the public domain.

The future is looking pretty saturated in terms of electronic data to me... Pretty soon my search results for most topics should increase significantly. These days I usually get about 10,000 to 100,000 results for most topics I am looking for through a search engine. I might end up with over 1,000,000 search results or more by 2011, if this article's prediction is true. Yikes!