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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

It's mind-boggling really.
Sometimes I like the web, but other times I just think it's like a huge bin chockablock with mind-litter.

And the copy of "Mankind" on a disc: what a weird magical mystery tour that'd be....

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