Querying the entire internet (100 billion rows!) with MotherDuck MotherDuck published an analysis of Common Crawl's web archive, which has collected roughly 2.2 billion pages and about 150 TiB per monthly crawl since 2008, to measure how much personal, platform-hosted publishing has grown on services such as GitHub, Vercel and Lovable. The piece contrasts Common Crawl with the HTTP Archive, which covers about 16.2 million websites per crawl (15.4 million mobile, 12.2 million desktop) under its 2025 methodology, and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which holds more than 1 trillion URL captures and about 99 PB unique at roughly 150 TB per day. MotherDuck argues the full multi-year Common Crawl corpus, which would appear to total about 15 petabytes, can be queried directly on S3 rather than fully downloaded. DuckDB is small. The data it queries doesn't have to be. So let's try something big. Common Crawl has been crawling and publishing web pages since 2008, and every crawl lands on S3 for anyone to read. Coding agents have turned a lot of people into web developers, so here is the internet-sized question for today: how much has personal, platform-hosted publishing actually grown? GitHub, Vercel, Lovable and the rest all hand you a subdomain for whatever you just built, a dating app for ducks included. The obvious guess is that those subdomains are multiplying fast. Let's check. First some history before we get our hands on those 100 billion rows, so cue the old man yelling at the cloud. Common Crawl, HTTP Archive, Wayback Machine: same same, but different? If you've ever wanted to see the history of a page or find a site that has since been deleted, you may be familiar with the Wayback Machine, part of the Internet Archive. It is a great database of internet history, and while it is perfect for finding historical artefacts it doesn't lend itself well to analysis across sites. The HTTP Archive is a Google-backed project that cares less about the content than about the technology of the web, and it even loads JavaScript, partially, when it crawls. The downside is that it mostly captures the homepage of a site and nothing else. Our dataset of choice, Common Crawl, does not load JavaScript, so it might miss parts of a JavaScript-powered single-page application, but it does go wide and deep, following all the links it finds. That makes it perfect to find, for example, github.io pages, which usually have the structure