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That's a lot of web-pages!

In fact, if you viewed one page per second, it would take 135 years to inspect every single one of them -- by which time there'd probably be a thousand times as many new ones still waiting to be seen.

While many of these pages will contain little more than dross, an awful lot of them are loaded with extremely useful and interesting information -- but there's a bit of a problem.

You and I probably haven't noticed this problem, but I bet there are millions of people all around the world who have.

I refer of course to the fact that the language of the Net is English.

It would be a fair bet that the vast majority of those four and a quarter billion web-pages indexed by Google are written by and for people fluent in the English language.

If you're Chinese, Korean, Russian or just about any other non-English-speaking person then the Net is a *much* smaller place.

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To check this out, I entered a very simple search term that was pretty much guaranteed to appear on every English-based webpage.

Sure enough, this query produced 5.7 billion matches.

Hang on... 5.7 billion matches? I thought Google had only indexed a little over 4 billion pages?

I suspect this is simply an estimation error so it's not a big deal.

But now to try the search with a relatively commonplace such as dog which produces about 54 million hits.

Now, if we search for the word "dog" in German language sites (which is hund), we get just 2.7 million hits.

From this it is possible to suggest (albeit perhaps not very accurately) that the size of the German-language web is just 1/20th the size of the English-language one.

So, if you're a German, you could probably read all the German language websites on the Net in a mere seven years or so -- woohoo!

I'm left wondering whether the internet, and the WWW in particular, is going to be a massive catalyst to the spread of the English language. I wonder how many countries are now teaching English as a second-language because they know it's almost mandatory if students are to enjoy the maximum benefit the Net has to offer.

But let's not forget (of course) that there are a number of automatic translation services available on the web. As well as the original BabelFish there's now Google's service and InterTran, which I find *excellent* for those more less common languages such as Croatian, Welsh, Swedish, etc.

But, if you want to actually learn a new language you might be interested in what the BBC's up to. They've set up this excellent site which offers to teach you a useful level of French, Spanish, German or Italian.

So, if you're feeling bored and can't find anything to do on the Net during these long winter evenings -- just sit down and wow your friends by learning a foreign language!

Fino a domani...

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