Are Webmasters Magicians
I wish we could be and we could wave our magic wands and 'hey presto' every clients website would be at number one on the leading search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN but alas that's impossible even if we were Magicians. With billions yes billions of web pages its simply not possible for everyone to attain the dizzy heights of staring in the top 10 let alone the top 3 positions.
How many websites are there?
In reality no one really knows as there is no central server controlling the internet and no one company in overall charge which is the beauty of the internet as it is free from such bureaucracy, thank goodness with today's ever growing control of personal movements by CCTV and Traffic monitoring cameras and GPS it would seem we are beginning to live the dream or maybe the nightmare of George Orwell's 1984 but 23 years later than he planned.
The total number of websites is indeed an interesting conundrum. What about counting the number of registered domains around the world, well whilst this is possible this would only confirm the number of registered url names but many domains are not even hosted and are acquired for future use or 'fencing' around traded domains or they might only have a holding page.
The number of websites are one thing but the number of web pages is another but according to the Netcraft Web Survey carried out in February in 2007 which counted the number of web sites visited by their automatic web spider software identified 108,810,358 million websites. This is probably a conservative estimate but at least it's a head count.
How Many Web Pages are There?
It would be easier if both of the larger Search Engines Google and Yahoo publicised the number of indexed pages but this is not available and hasn't been public information since August 2005 as neither search engine wanted to admit the numbers indexed for competitive reasons.
Some large websites might contain many thousands of pages which are dynamically generated which means the actual number of pages changes constantly. Whereas the majority of websites are usually less than 300 and the vast majority less than 50 pages. As the actual number of web pages changes it can never be determined and only roughly estimated.
According to published figures as of August 2005 we can estimate that the average number of web pages indexed by Yahoo as @ August 2005 was 19.2 Billion pages. According to Netcraft the number of web sites in the world was estimated to be in excess of 70,392 million which equates to an average website consisting of approximately 270 pages. If we assume that this average hasn't changed much since 2005 the latest figures by Netcraft estimated in February 2007 will mean that there must be in excess of around 30 billion web pages.
Web pages in the world, August 2005: 19.2 billion pages were indexed by Yahoo as of August 2005.
Web sites in the world, August 2005: 70,392,567 web sites were indexed by Netcraft as of August 2005.
That's a lot of pages and a very big library indeed
This is of course approximate as there is no way of actually verifying Netcrafts claims but it's a reasonable calculated guess and it certainly puts the world wide web into some sense of perspective
The total World population : 6,599 Million
Ref: www.geohive.com/default1.aspx
The largest Library in the World: 24 million books
The Library of Congress in the USA
Harvard has approximately 14 million books
The Estimated number of websites in the world: 109 Million
The estimated number of web pages: 30,000 Million
5 times the worlds population and growing faster
For every person on the planet there is probably at least 5 published web pages and growing daily faster than babies are being born. Considering the internet and the World Wide Web is just over a decade old at only 12 years it's staggering that this has grown so fast and furious.
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