The internet is not too big. It is, however, too crowded.
Nobody gets on the internet any more. It’s too crowded.
I use the 1/“embiggen” function myself.
Maybe Al Gore could make a smaller internet.
Seriously…that’s a feature, not a bug. As pointed out up thread, it’s actually a hell of a lot easier to find stuf today than it was even 5 years ago, let alone when the world wide web first came out. The cool thing about the internet today is that it’s really, really big…and yet, anyone can get on it and easily search it and get mountains of information on whatever it is they want information on. It’s really an incredible tool, and it’s just getting bigger and bigger, we are all becoming more and more interconnected.
Grumpy Cat says no.
Besides Grumpy Cat, 
Hans Rosling also agrees. Particularly on the issue of public funded data bases, it has been like pulling teeth, but this situation is changing as many governments are finding that it can be beneficial not only to their countries, but to the whole world.
And it is not only the data but the tools that are available and become available that allows even common citizens the ability to do their own research or to help on massive scientific investigations.
There is an ocean of information that is just beginning to be available that leads to more discoveries and clever solutions to problems, even on a global scale.
I understand exactly where you are coming from XT,but to me the Internet is way beyond the biggest library,yes it’s fantastic but also dangerous too if you know where I’m coming from.
I had a wee bout of the flu yesterday and popped open my daughter’s Acer tablet,I started at around 10 a.m. with around the usual 40/50 emails,after answering them I got rid of the spam mail,time was 12.10 p.m.
Watched A letter to Zackary,awesome doc btw on You Tube.
Time for some grub as it was late afternoon 1.45 now.
Back in bed,time for some gigs I’d missed by U2 and Rush on You Tube.5.30 dinner beckons.
6.30 pops on here and a couple of other websites I frequent,few postings then before I know it it’s 10.45 p.m.
If truth be told I could do this every day 24/7 for the rest of my life and still there’d be tons of stuff on the net I’d never see,know what I mean?
Nearly 5 million Facebook views,that is incredible.
That’s all very well and good, but in what way would you want it “shrunk”? What type of content would you have removed?
It’s hard to say mate,one man’s junk is another man’s gold I suppose.
I’m pretty sure you have come across a few sites that you ask yourself ‘WTF is that all about.’
A good number of years ago I was on a mainly British website which i won’t name as I don’t want it getting ‘Hits’.
The guy who ran the sight was a currant short of a fruitcake,if nobody agreed with him he’d tell them to literally f*** O**,so I pulled him up one day and he said he’d look me up next time he was in Scotland and do me in.
He was reported by me and others yet his website is still up and running,God knows why,yet the scary thing is,many of the folk who admire him are females,don’t ask me why though,then again you often watch telly program’s about murderers getting fan mail from women and vice versa,crazy innit.
I used to read the Straight Dope as a small two paragraph bit in the local “SD Reader”… now its on teh Interwebs…and I cant even keep up with one thread…
Futurists have noted that the Web could be viewed as a memory add-on for humans, holding data for access which are too dense to memorize…so search tools are really the lever for all this.
I thought Google was such a stupid name for a company that it would never go ANYWHERE!! Buy some stock? haha…
Of course, when the power goes down, and no one remembers how to make fire anymore or purify water etc… (sort of half serious, but you get the drift)
On the other hand, the knowledge once held by few, and thus passed on to few, is now accessable to one and all. If this information is spread far enough and learned by enough people, even if piecemeal, I think we’ll be alright.
That’s exactly the problem. The content available has grown as technology gives us more options and as the gatekeepers have vanished, but we still have 24 hour days, and we still need roughly 8 hours of sleep, and we still have to work, many of us. It is not just the Internet - when I was a kid in the '60s we had seven TV channels (NY had more than most) and you could usually see what you wanted. If you missed a movie at the theater, you had to wait until it came on TV. I could read nearly every sf book that was published.
Even if you spent zero time on the net, you can record more programs than you could possibly watch, you can stream more stuff from Netflix than you can watch, and you can even buy 8 or 10 DVD sets of weird stuff, that would keep you busy for ages. I think the hot job of the future is not going to be creating content, since any nitwit can do that, but being a trusted content filter, so that your customers precious minutes are spend wisely.