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by hhmmmm on May 17th, 2007

hhmmmm

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Is it possible to download the whole internet and surf offline?

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  • by Jeffers on May 17th, 2007

    Jeffers

    Theoretically, yes.

    Practically, no.

    First, I assume you're speaking practically of the entire world-wide web.

    You could do so, but you would need

    1.) an incredibly large storage array - some many, many terabytes of storage.
    2.) you'd need an account/password for every secured site in existence.
    3.) you'd need to write some sort of web-crawler to creep through every registered domain in existence, suck all the data down to the local machine, and write it to the local storage array.
    4.) you'd need a heckuva big pipe (really high-speed internet connection)
    5.) you'd need time. lots of time.

    If you had all hard resources, you'd need time to download everything.

    Essentially, you'd be doing everything that the major search engines do - and more. They download and index primary information, but they do not cache every little thing on the page (most often, they skip images)

    In reality, by the time you were done, much of the stuff you downloaded would be stale. (Think about it - how often do you follow a google link to find the page at the other end doesn't match what you were expecting to find...)

    The practical side says: Why bother? just surf it live, where you'll get the most recent information. The cost to attempt such a thing would be far more expensive than simply buying a laptop and subscribing to a mobile internet card for your laptop. (I think Sprint offers them for around $40 a month)

    Comments

    • Excellent answer.

      Anonymous too

      by Anonymous too on May 17th, 2007

    • Absolutely awesome answer.

      Karl Plesz

      by Karl Plesz on May 18th, 2007

    • Excellent ansser, but in fact it's even harder than you describe - because a growing part of the Internet isn't static pages but is made up of dynamic content. So at best you'd have a snapshot of a page.. at worst sites would not work at all.

      Cat

      by Cat on November 30th, 2009

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