As of last year, there were something like 650 million active web sites on the Internet. That number is growing fast, but even if it weren't--even if it stopped dead in its tracks right now--you could spend the next 50 years surfing the web at a pace of five sites per minute, 12 hours a day, 365 days per year, and you'd still only visit (briefly) 10% of the Internet Universe.

 

Unlike the actual Universe, however, the Internet's places do not exist in physical space--there's no such thing as one website being "close" or "far" from another one; the two are either linked or they are not.

 

While those links don't correspond directly to any kind of distance or direction, they do suggest a relationship. If, for example, someone built a personal website, and linked to their website through their Facebook page, people would really only arrive at the website via the Facebook page.