How to handle growth?

Number of websites is increasing rapidly (much of the growth is in the recent period coming from blogging sites). Total number of sites had, according to Netcraft, increased for 0.7 million in November 2007 (reaching 7 billion).

Others may be claiming different figures - stating that Netcraft's figures are too low. Possible. We don't want to debate about the different methodological approaches. We just want to show that the web is growing. Non-stop. With every minute (when I will publish this post the we will again grow for one additional site). ;-)

So what are the options, the ways to handle and cope with such amount of data, which is coming from various sources: from personal websites, companies, news sites, blogs,...

One option for dealing with this information-overload is: SEARCH ENGINES. Yep! They handle this for us. We just querry and they offer us a solution. And we usually get what we were looking for.

It's always: Let's Google or I'll Google you (in some cases people even Google somebody before going on a date with him). ;-) Google as a strategic tool. ;-)

But this is today's state-of-mind of the search. What will be the future?

iJustine pointed to a fantastic & inspirational video of Jonathan Harris:





Jonathan demonstrates the features of two projects (one is We feel fine and the other is Universe). Both projects are visualization of web - drawn with the help of API & numerous "footprints" which are left behind by web-users.

The future of search & visualization of data, which exist online, will have to go into this direction. There is no other way!

P.S.: And the visualization of data is definitely more beautiful than the Google's result page. ;-)

Thanks iJustine.