We all understand that the Internet is huge.
众所周知，互联网是个庞然大物。
If I printed the whole thing out, I'd have …how many pieces of paper?
如果把它的全部内容打印出来，我得用......多少张纸？
In 2007, as part of his master's thesis（硕士论文） at Tilburg University, the Dutch Web consultant Maurice de Kunder developed a statistical method for tracking the number of pages indexed by major search engines.
2007年，作为蒂尔堡大学硕士毕业论文的一部分，荷兰网络顾问莫里斯·德·坎德开发了一种统计方法，用于追踪各大搜索引擎索引的网页数量。
And now it's still constantly updating the number of pages in Google and Bing search.
现在它仍在不断更新谷歌和必应搜索中的网页数量。
A couple attentions here: Even this figure is an estimate, and it doesn't capture anything outside the reach of search engines. But for our purposes, de Kunder said, we can assume there are roughly 47 billion pages on the indexed, searchable Web.
这里有几点要注意。这个数字只是一个估计，它没有捕捉到任何在搜索引擎范围之外的网页。但德·坎德说，为了达到我们的目的，我们可以假定，在有索引、可搜索的互联网上大概有470亿个网页页面。
Meanwhile, to find how many printed pages each of those 47 billion would be, I needed to visit a representative（代表性的） sample of Web sites and try to print out each.
同时，为了得出这470亿个网页中每个网页的打印页数，我需要访问有代表性的网站样本，并尝试打印出每个网页。
To arrive at a fair average, I'd have to test 385 random sites.
为了得出一个合理的平均值，我需要随机测试385个网站。
It turned out that the average site came out to 6.5 printed pages.
结果发现，网站的平均打印页数为6.5页。
From here, of course, the experiment gets pretty easy. Multiplying 47 billion by 6.5 gives you 305,500,000,000 pages, approximately.
当然，从这里开始，实验就变得非常简单了。将470亿乘以6.5，就能得出结果，大约需要305,500,000,000页纸。
This is, to be clear, just an estimate: There's some room for error in my page-length average, and the Internet's changing all the time.
需要说明的是，这只是一个估计。我得出的平均页面长度有一定的误差，并且，互联网一直在变化。
But it's still difficult to even contemplate（想象） how much material that comes out to: It's like 212 million copies of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
但是，我们仍然很难想象这到底是多少张纸：这大约是2.12亿册列夫·托尔斯泰的《战争与和平》。
That's just a speck（灰尘） in the huge, abstract Internet sea. Seriously.
说真的，这其实只是巨大而抽象的互联网中的沧海一粟。
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