"In practical terms, it is actually possible to take all of the images and data from every website the average person visits in a lifetime, compress them, and fit them onto a single 2-terabyte (TB) hard drive inside a computer."
These are among the many "unspoken truths" of the web, viz. that right now on your person or nearby you have enough storage space to hold every bit of information you will ever need in your lifetime.
I would like to see the statistics.
Obviously, companies like Google are not going to embrace truths like these.
When a user can search a database of downloaded data ("data dump") locally, even without a connection, how would a search engine track the user's queries?
Right now, public information, from academic research to user-generated content, is being hoarded by a few companies and used to collect information about those who wish to access it, which is then used to sell ads.
This is a relatively recent phenomenon and is not necessary.
This is supposed to be the Information Age. We can all access public information in large quantities at high speeds without constant monitoring in the name of pillaging advertising budgets.
While it may not be possible to save every piece of information one needs in advance, certainly much of the piecemeal access to static data that we do today could be averted. (Personally I have been doing this with DNS data for many years, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.)
Why is piecemeal access something anyone would want to avert? Matters of cost, reliablity and inefficiency aside, it is piecemeal access, one query at a time, each and every one traveling over a insecure network, logged and analyzed 24/7 by myriad third parties all desperate for cash, that gives rise to memes like "You are the product".
It is the gratuitous use of an insecure, invasively monitored network to query information which could be stored locally that is the root cause for many of the complaints that internet users have today. This type of use enables the practices by third parties that users complain about.