How Big Is The Web?

How big is the web? It sounds like one of those existential questions for philosophers but the answer is strange and ever changing. Google claims to search 8,058,044,651 pages. No doubt other search engines claim to search billions of pages too.

Over the last few weeks, WhoisIreland.com has been developing a new global service covering the history of every hoster in com/net/org/biz/info. Part of the project involved checking every website in com/net/org/biz/info to build an IP map of the web. The results of checking all the websites in the commercial gTLDs show some unusual patterns.

The Coming Soon/Parked web servers of the major hosters and registrars tend to stand out. The IPs of these servers tend to show up as hosting thousands of sites. In some cases, it is actually millions of parked domains. With nearly 40 million .com domains, a significant percentage of them are parked.

The typical figure for domain utilisation in the gTLDs is around 70%. In plain English, that means that 70% of domains in com/net/org/biz/info are being used for something. The problem is that many of these studies do not explain what that “something” is. It could be websites. It could be mailservers. It could be just being parked. But in web terms, the number of active websites, with content, could be lower than 70%.

Google’s approximate counts for webpages in the commercial gTLDs and the number of domains in each gTLD are below:

The figures above are for the main commercial gTLDS and exclude the .edu, .mil and .name TLDs. Of course there is another question - how much of the content on these pages is unique and usable. That is a qualitative problem rather than a quantitative problem. Or as the quote from the TV sitcom “Father Ted” would have it: “That would be an ecumenical question.”

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Written by John McCormac on July 31st, 2005 with comments disabled.
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