The web grows to over 100 million web sites

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 06 November 2006 19:24

Your IT - Entertainment

Remember when Google boasted of over 8 billion pages in its index, and then the tit-fot-tat skirmishes with Yahoo on whose index was biggest? Now a figure on the number of sites online has been released, and it’s in the millions, not billions. What gives?

Take a walk down Google’s corporate memory lane, where their milestones are documented, and you’ll come across references to their first billion page index, then 2 billion, then 4, then over 8 billion pages and more.

The culminated in a web pages arms race with Yahoo, who claimed in August 2005 to have 19.2 billion pages in its index.

This enraged Google at the time, who claimed much duplication of sites in the index, making Yahoo’s massive number little more than meaningless.

In response, Google removed the reference to the 8,168,684,336 pages in their index the next month, in September 2005, and issued a challenge to web users to simply guess how many sites were in Google’s newly expanded index. Guess, because Google wasn’t going to give a number any more, beyond simply claiming that their index was 3 times larger than their closest competitor, who they did not actually name.

So it will no doubt come as a bit of a surprise for some to discover an online report quoting a survey from British firm Netcraft who claimed that the number of actual web sites – not the many web pages that fill up all those web sites – has finally broken the 100 million site barrier, climbing from 97.9 million sites last month in October, to 101 million in November.

The growth in 2006 was 27.4 million new sites, up from 17 million created in 2005. That has helped towards a doubling of growth since 2004, when there were only 50 million websites. To see how far we’ve come, the first Netcraft survey showed only 18,957 sites in August of 1995, just before Windows 95 took on the world.

Naturally many of those 101 million web sites contain dozens, if not hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of web pages. Wikipedia itself claims over 1.4 million articles for the English language version of the website alone, with foreign language versions containing millions of articles alone.

But Wikipedia is just one site, so it only ranks as one of the 101 million web sites out there.

What has pushed the numbers up from that 97.9 million sites mark to over 100 million is the huge proliferation of blogs, in addition to small businesses galore deciding to either get a website, or to update their current site to something new and fresh.

Given how popular the Yellow Pages has always been, the Internet proves you can’t just rely on Yellow Pages advertising any more. In addition to whatever media advertising a company does on radio, TV, in the ads before the cinema movies, in newspapers, magazines and elsewhere. With Google being the way to find the information you’re looking for, the Yellow Pages people around the world have been trying to keep up, and keep the customers paying.

So with the predictions of the ecommerce boom in the late 90s, it should come as no surprise that it pretty much all came true, and more businesses than ever now have an online presence, and are even upgrading their brochureware sites into something with an ecommerce backend to fulfil customer orders and to do some basic customer relationship management.

It’s also those free blogging services that have pumped up the numbers. Technorati, a website that catalogues and lets you search through all the blogged content out there, reports more than 175,000 blogs created daily, with each counting as a separate site.

So, from 101 million websites, there are billions upon billions of pages. Despite 10 years of the modern Internet, it still boggles the mind. How soon before we double again to 200 million sites, and then zoom past 1 billion?

At this rate we might just collectively achieve the 200 million web site mark by this time next year. And if you don’t already have your own web site, perhaps you will in the next 12 months.