tedster - 1:00 am on Nov 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

To get a handle on that, you'd need to study the whole development of, first, the Internet, and then the world-wide web. A really quick answer is that the WWW was conceived as a way to give everyone a way to share documents, rather than just geeks sharing data. But in the final analysis, the web is still just 0's and 1's today. It just gets represented to us as something more comprehensible.

Happy research: Internet History [freesoft.org]; The WWW Project [w3.org]

Note that this sorting record that Google set did use "100-byte records" - and that's getting pretty small, but yes, it's still more that just one bit.