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""In 1993 there were 130 Websites on the Internet""

The latest estimate (taken in January 2003) is that there are something like 170 million websites, and looking at the data for previous surveys by the same group the number is growing by 50% a year.

I was trying to get an exact figure, but it's not possible with the Internet being the dynamic organism that it is. However along the way I found out some neat facts.

For a start, I'm still gobsmacked that only 10 years ago there were only 130 Websites on the Internet. I think I'd be safe in betting that they were mostly porn free too.

Then I wondered how many 'webpages' there actually were, afterall, a website is just a collection of webpages, isn't it? Well, no. Pop along to Tesco.com for example, lots of webpages there, but you're looking at an extranet, that part of the Tesco organisation that links their internal intranet with the World Wide Web. So we're only looking at the tip of the iceberg, and most commercial organisations operate the same way.

For the sake of argument, we'll estimate that there's 50 webpages per website with 1000 words on each. That would mean that the Internet consists of 8,500,000,000,000 words. Or eight and a half trillion words if you prefer me to spell it out. Not to mention images, moving pictures and sounds. That's a LOT of information.

Contained within that information would be every book ever published, every movie ever made, every thought ever recorded, every event in history; in fact you could almost declare that mankind's entire knowledge and experiences to date were contained within today's Internet.

And yet the way technology is moving, it wouldn't surprise me if one day someone invented an optical disc that could store it all. Then in a few billion years some student Alien could pop into his local bookstore and order a copy of 'Mankind' to go.

I need to get out more. As a parting quip, along my surfing investigation I discovered a newsgroup where someone had asked a similar question: "How many websites are there?"

The answer he got was:

I don't know how many websites there are, but here is the URL
for the last one....

http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html

ummm dude... if you never noticed, you just made something a bit more obvious than what i said, and didnt oppose it, so technically were both right, nur nur nur nur nur (does this sound like an ambulcance) nur nur nur

aninem wrote:
> Kyz22 wrote:
> Woah, thats madness. I have like 10 websites of my own and 6 I have
> made for others.
>
> 10 years ago I would have been 1/20th of the internet!
>
> same ere... infact with the amount of sites people on these forums
> have made, we'd all probably equal to about 500/20 of the internet 10
> years ago... weird

500/20 is actually 25/1. So We would heve to have 25 x 130 webpages betwen us = 3250 webpages in total.

You are wrong. I am right. Nur nur nur nur nur....

Kyz22 wrote:
> Woah, thats madness. I have like 10 websites of my own and 6 I have
> made for others.
>
> 10 years ago I would have been 1/20th of the internet!

same ere... infact with the amount of sites people on these forums have made, we'd all probably equal to about 500/20 of the internet 10 years ago... weird

Woah, thats madness. I have like 10 websites of my own and 6 I have made for others.

10 years ago I would have been 1/20th of the internet!

Its quite facinating, every little piece of information recorded being uploaded to the web, and possibly staying there for eternity.

Forums bursting with information, archived.
News, archived.
Buisness records, archived.

Plus features like googles auto-cache on webpages help this archiving, prolonging the life of out infomation. And lets face it, there is a lot that we would wish not to keep.

Essentially the internet is like a log, a log of everyones life. A complete log of infomation, that can be filtered down to the most smallest amount....

cookie monster wrote:
> Im guessing they can only really tell how many sites there are by
> those registered with search engines, in which case there may be
> double the quoted figure

The count is performed by the Internet Software Consortium by doing a complete search of the domain name system. This can contain a potential 2^32 (4.3 billion) IP addresses, so they narrow it down a little by various methods, and then start pinging away and getting results back.

Although the number of websites appears to be increasing by 50% per annum, a graph taken over time shows it as a steep curve starting to flatten out, so it's doubtful if it'll reach 250,000,000 websites over the next 3 to 5 years.

Im guessing they can only really tell how many sites there are by those registered with search engines, in which case there may be double the quoted figure, quite a lot of people have websites but dont register with search engines, i for one.

Porn is like the cancer of the internet, i was looking for an mp3, and went to a particular site (after being linked there through 5 other sites) and i was presented with a barrage of porno pop ups, Not one or two, im talking about six or seven.

These pop ups are logged into my computer and it makes me look like a dirty buggger, its violating my privacy. Dirty web tycoons.

I think I once heard somewhere that there were about five porn site for every non-porn site. so I think that means that the interent is about 5/6 porn.(excuse any poor maths that I have done) It really does say it all. I'm not too bothered though.

All hail porn!

It's ridiculous how quickly it's grown. Most of the growth was pioneered by the porn industry by the way.

They were the first to work out how to pay for stuff over the 'net, and how to stream video over the 'net as well.

If it wasn't for porn, you may not be able to watch movie clips or buy anything online at all...