The WWW traffic and the appearance of new sites has been increasing at about 60%/month (December,1994 ). By July 1994, over a terabyte/month of "information" has been delivered by over 3000 Web servers, on the average, 300 MB/server,month. By the summer of 1995 we may expect over 100 terabytes/month. So far, the traffic growth has been driven by the appearance of new servers, adding a great deal of variety as well as quantity.
The problem for us mere mortals is that our rate of information assimilation into long-term memory is about 1 (one) byte/second or about 10^5 bytes/month taking a full one hour/day of "surfing" the Net. So, we already have an "impedance" mismatch of 10^7. By next summer, our ability to assimilate will be less then one in 10^9. A more elaborate empirical study on WebGlut and possible ways to cope is reported by December,1994 .
The point of the above back of the envelope exercise is to illustrate the common sense observation that the Web is in need of powerful filtering mechanisms that will help us to cope with the real InfoGlut that will hit us in the near future. While mechanical searching devices of the future will ease the labor and pain of identification, collection, classification and delivery of compacted, higher-grade knowledge, it appears that for now we have to rely primarly on human skills to do those tasks.