In 2008, Google had indexed One Trillion Web Pages. And many, many more have been added since then. According to Rick Skrenta, co-founder of blekko, there are now more web pages than there are things in the world. And while it’s likely not the case yet, as there are probably 10.5 Sextillion bugs in the world (as it is estimated that there are 1.5 Billion Bugs per person, and there are close to 7 Billion people), and we could count each individual bug as a thing, at the rate the web is growing –especially when each post, each comment, and each tweet can be its own web page — it might not be long before this is true, especially since predictions put the size of the web at 600 quintillion web pages, or one for every 17.5 bugs, by 2020 (which puts us at one page per bug by about 2021).

With content proliferating faster than even the fastest computer virus, it’s getting almost impossible to find what you’re looking for through a web search. Good luck coming up with an initial query that returns less than 100,000 pages. I tried three random combinations of unlikely words in Google, and the best I got was 190,000 pages. (Dodo, apollo, elvis – 961K; Risk, canary, electricity – 1.43M; Poppins, Hamlet, vikings – 190K.) There’s a reason that Googlewhacking died a long, long time ago. There is no one result anymore.

And that’s why blogs, which have been proclaimed dead by the twits who think tweets are the future, are going to return to the glory days. You need someone to sift through the noise and find the useful content to get you through your day, because it’s now beyond the power of even the most powerful search engines to do most of the time. So keep reading SI, and you’ll have one fewer (time-consuming) search to do each day.