I have a theory that the vast amounts of information available to us on the Internet actually makes it harder, rather than easier, to do basic research. My theory partly derives from the fact that I don’t believe anything I read or receive over the Internet unless it is something unflattering about someone I already don’t like, in which case I take it as gospel truth no matter how implausible or easily refutable it is.

But the larger driving force behind my theory is best illustrated by an experience I had a couple of years ago when, for reasons that now escape me, I needed to know the population of India. To get that information, I Googled the words “world population” and in the blink of an eye I had a list of the population of every country in the world.

Several lists, in fact, and therein lies the beginning of the problem. Not all the lists showed the same population for India. So I looked at different lists and more or less triangulated a figure that seemed like it would do the job. In case you’re interested, it turns out that at the time India was home to around 1.129 billion people, or approximately 17% of the 6.58 billion people in the world.

China had about 1.32 billion people, or about 20% of the world’s population. The United States? Around 301 million people, or a mere 4.85% of the world’s population. Iraq? 26.7 million. The Turks and Caicos Island? 21,300. The Falkland Islands? 3,000. Vatican City? 783.

Having found what I was looking for, I could have ended my research, gotten off the Internet and gone about my business. And if you think that’s easy to do, then you haven’t spent much time on the Internet lately. The information I came across made me curious about the possible correlation between the world’s most populous countries and the world’s largest countries. So I did some more clicking.

Turns out Russia is the largest country in the world with about 6.6 million square miles, followed by Canada (3.9 million square miles), the United States and China (both with about 3.7 million square miles), then Brazil, Australia and India with around 1.2 million square miles.

The largest city on earth (Tokyo with 34.2 million residents) is in one of the smaller countries as are the next-largest cities (Mexico City with 22.8 million people and Seoul with 22.3 million). So it turns out there is no correlation between the world’s physically largest countries and the world’s most populous cities.

Before I could tear myself away from the Internet, I learned many other things. The average American eats 263 eggs each year. There are more chickens than people on the planet. Plastic flamingos outnumber real flamingos in the United States. The largest living thing on the face of the earth is an underground mushroom in Oregon measuring 3 1/2 miles in diameter. Cranberry Jell-O is the only flavor that contains real fruit. The Eiffel Tower has 2.5 million rivets in it. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

By the time I was done, I couldn’t remember why I cared about the population of India, which may have been a good thing since its population had increased by a couple thousand or so in the hour I spent looking it up. The next time I need to know how many people live in a particular country, I’ll skip the Internet and save time by just counting them myself.

Thinking about the Internet this morning made me wonder about the most visited websites on the Internet. Not surprisingly, as of April of 2023, by far the most-visited site is Google with nearly 84 billion visits each month. That’s as many monthly visits as the next 10 most popular sites on the list combined. Also not surprisingly, the most popular websites tend to be search engines, social media networks, and streaming and online TV.

However, three adult websites (XVideos, XNXX and Pornhub) hold down the 10th, 12th and 13th spots on the list with about 2.5 to 3 billion visits each per month. (Proof that some kinds of research are more interesting than others). The fastest-rising website on the list is OpenAI, which hosts the popular AI tool ChatGPT with nearly 2 billion visits per month.

I’m sure this provides important insight into the state of the world today, or it would if I could just find a website that tells me what to make of it.

Tom Tyler of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.