Every week I get a dozen or so of press releases in my email inbox. Usually they come from companies that are launching a new website or service, and that want to get some free exposure. Needless to say that I skip virtually all of those.
Yesterday, however, a very intriguing press release hit my inbox. It was from a company called MyWebDownload.com. After reading through a couple of lines, I was surprised to see the service that they are offering: they basically allow users from around the world to download the World Wide Web! That is right, you can download the whole thing to your computer and be able to surf offline after that.
Needless to say that I was skeptical, but here is what I found on the FAQ that they have on the site:
Q: Isn’t the Web too big to for anyone to be able to download it?
If we consider the whole World Wide Web, yes it would be impossible to download it. The latest numbers from Google estimate that there are around 40 billion pages on the Web. If we then estimate that each page has 10KB on average, that is already 400,000,000,000 KB, or 400 Terabytes!It turns out, however, that 90% of those websites are pornographic or gambling related. Once we removed those, therefore, the size of The Web was reduced to 10% of its initial value, or 40,000,000,000 KB (40 Terabytes).
After that we removed the illegal MP3 and movie downloads, and the YouTube videos. This further reduced the size of The Web to 3,444,000,000 (or 3,444 Terabytes), and that is the size of our file collection.
I guess it makes sense.
The files are very big, each with over 100 Gigabytes. The site recommend users to use a download manager software to make sure that they will be able to pause and restart downloads if necessary.
On the company website they also mention that they are developing a product version, where you will pay $49 and receive 132 DVDs in your house with The Web. The product is not available yet though.
Overall it is a nice idea, and certainly a website to keep an eye on.
Update: It looks like the download links are currently disabled due to excessive server load.
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