Counting Webpages As Websites?

A “search engine” wannabe mistook the number of webpages that Google has indexed for the number of websites on the net. The blog post is linked here but this is what it says:

“There I was sitting in the garden with a laptop, wireless broadband is great isn’t it, anyway, taking in the rays when it occurred to me how hard it is for a website to be seen when currently there are around 8,058,044,651 (yes all 8,058,044,651 of them.)”

Perhaps it was a bit too warm today. The number of web pages that Google has indexed is not the same as the number of websites on the net.

As a country level search engine operator, I frequently see these claims. Even Microsoft now claims to have an “Irish” search engine. But someone confusing the number of webpages with the number of websites is definitely a first.

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Written by John McCormac on July 12th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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7 comments

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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com fmk
#1. July 12th, 2005, at 7:12 PM.

john - how’s your counting of irish blogs getting on? close to a ball park figure?

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. July 12th, 2005, at 7:30 PM.

I’ve been working on a global indexing project which took me away from the Irish blogosphere research Feargal,

But in terms of Irish blogs, I think that the estimate of there being around 9000 Irish blogs is highly optimistic. Just from the work I did on it a few months ago, it was a very small set of about 1000 or so active Irish blogs and the activity was confined to a fraction of that per day.

The 9000 blogs figure does not take into account blog attrition. Many bloggers seem to get caught up in the whole buzz, frequently after an article in the traditional media. These blogs then are left to moulder after the sheer grind of writing something interesting and new every day becomes apparent. most end up commenting on other blogs or on news events.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com fmk
#3. July 12th, 2005, at 7:57 PM.

the 9k figure is wrong - it’s supposed to be based on the number of livejournal users, but only a registered paid-up livejournal user can verify it. nationamaster.com put the dec 2004 livejournal fig at just over 2k. the msn spaces fig seems v small, the foneblog figure (1k) i think is overstated (counts inactive users). all told, i think you’ll be lucky to find more than 2.5k tops.

there did seem to be a general buzz in the early part of this year, which has dropped off dramatically over the last two/three months. maybe it’s just new year’s resolutions wearing out …

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#4. July 12th, 2005, at 8:17 PM.

Also there is a fundamental change in the internet population at this time of year. A lot of bloggers, the students, would be on holiday. So I’d expect blogging activity to tail off around this time.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#5. July 17th, 2005, at 3:39 PM.

Noted Michele,
Even so, the operator of searchtheowl banned Blacknight. Though many other hosters with high .ie counts would have had problems with this guy spamming their clients, the list was probably only limited to those with visible contact e-mails rather than every website owner. Perhaps he just bans anyone who complains about his spamming/link request activities. He banned WhoisIreland as well but that could be for any reason from pointing out his cluelessness on local search to showing that his super seekrit encryption was really simplistic Javascript based scrambling. I wonder if now that he has knocked WhoisIreland out of his index, he will be able to find the site in future. Though he is probably reading this. - Hi Mike :)

Strangely his “websiteexperts.ie” site has been down for the last few weeks. He has been hosting it on a low end US hoster. Since he has referred to me as an ‘”expert” critic’, I find it quite ironic that a: he would consider himself a website expert and b: couldn’t keep his own website operating. Perhaps he now considers himself a worthy competitor for Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and has given up the webdesign work.

Sometimes I wonder about why the search business attracts people to it. But then the naive newbies who think that building a good search engine is easy tend to drastically outnumber cynical veterans who understand the realities in this business.