Do you want to surf the internet even without an internet connection? Seemed impossible right? Not anymore. A website called MyWebDownload.com is designed to allow internet users to download the whole world wide web in their computers and surf the internet via the download when offline. Amazing ‘ayt!
This program was initiated by three Computer Science students of the University of Kingsman in Georgia: Michael Larrock, Steven Finchel and Larry Cusack. Their brilliant project was supported by some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which funded the cost for the servers and bandwidth consumption.
If proven successful, this website and its downloads will surely hit the online market very very soon. Although the popularity of internet has reached great heights and people now have recognized the importance of internet in almost all aspects of life — relationships, business, education, politics, world news, and much much more — a lot of people are still not drawn or have not experience the power of internet for lack of access.
Just today, when I visited their website, the notice was:
There are 1,203,304 users downloading The Web right now. We were forced to temporarily disable new downloads, therefore, else our servers would not be able to sustain the load. Please come back in a couple of hours.
Interesting right? Makes you go to their website now and download the web but would get frustrated because more than a million are doing that right now and probably experiencing exasperation because of the terrible slow download. Worth a try anyway. So here are some of the excerpts from their website to enlighten you more on this unbelievable but very welcome program:
We believe that access to the World Wide Web should be universal, and not limited to people who are covered by the service of Internet providers or by those who can afford to pay for an Internet connection.
For that purpose, we launched this project 6 months ago, and started collecting and organizing all the websites and pages into a downloadable file collection.
To facilitate the download process, we have split The Web into 28 different files, each one with several gigabytes of data. Once you have downloaded them, you will just need a web browser to start surfing offline!
Q: Isn’t the Web too big to for anyone to be able to download it?
If we consider the whole World Wide Web, yes it would be impossible to download it. The latest numbers from Google estimate that there are around 40 billion pages on the Web. If we then estimate that each page has 10KB on average, that is already 400,000,000,000 KB, or 400 Terabytes!It turns out, however, that 90% of those websites are pornographic or gambling related. Once we removed those, therefore, the size of The Web was reduced to 10% of its initial value, or 40,000,000,000 KB (40 Terabytes).
After that we removed the illegal MP3 and movie downloads, and the YouTube videos. This further reduced the size of The Web to 3,444,000,000 (or 3,444 Terabytes), and that is the size of our file collection.
Q: The files are pretty big, what if my Internet connection goes down?
We recommend that you use a download manager software like DownloadThemAll, which will allow you to pause and restart your downloads. We will also release torrents of The Web pretty soon.Q: What about websites that publish new content ever day?
We recognize that one of the biggest advantages of the Web is the fact that it is dynamic and not static. To solve this problem, we will be crawling all websites that publish new content on a regular basis, and every month we will put a new file for download containing all the new information that we found.Q: I won’t be able to watch YouTube videos then?
Unfortunately no. But we already working on a second file collection that will enable the users to download all the videos from the 5 largest video sites on The Web.Q: Will I be able to use the Google search engine?
Yes. We realize that having a functional search engine is vital to browse The Web these days, so we have cached the first 100 search results for millions of keywords and included it with the Google website that you will find on the files (Google specifically is located at the third file).Q: Can this project release a file collection only with the porno websites please?
Due to popular request (we get over 100 emails daily asking for this feature…) we are already working on a file collection that will contain only the pornographic websites of The Web. There are no estimated time frame for the release, however, as the size of those files will be significantly larger, as will the number of download requests.Q: Will I be able to use the AOL chat or Twitter?
Unfortunately no. We are working in partnership with the Computer Science department of the University of Kindsman in Georgia, however, to develop an artificial intelligence specifically for the users surfing the web offline with our files. In order words, you will have bots that will interact with you in chatrooms, Twitter, and any other service where normally you would be able to interact with real people on The Web.Q: What if I don’t have an Internet connection at home?
We are deploying partnerships with several Internet cafes and Wi-fi spots from around the world. Those Internet points will basically keep a copy of The Web on their computers, and users will be able to burn CDs or DVDs locally.Q: What if I don’t have money to go to an Internet cafe and can’t access the Internet in no other way?
How the fuck are you reading this then?
Looks like this ambitious and incredible undertaking is not far from being very successful and when it happens, the world wide web would be too accessible and inexpensive to browse. Promising stunts of computer science students, genius nerds ‘aint they?
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