How Many Pages Are There On The WWW?

 

cartoon of earth and a computer screen both filled with numbers symbolizing the number of pages on the world wide web.

 

More Pages Than You Can Count?

No one knows the exact number of pages freely available on the web. New, unique, publicly accessible pages (aka the public web) are created every second. Given the enormous amount of information available on both the public web and the invisible web, it is clear that the careful researcher should investigate the hidden resources of the invisible web, and always use more than a single search engine. Since there is no central counting house or even a standard way of creating web pages, we can only make an educated guess at the number of web pages there are on the Internet. Several credible studies have tackled the problem.

Two Estimates

Cyveillance.com , a business intelligence gathering firm, attempted to count the pages on the web.   They then published a white paper called Sizing the Internet. Using their proprietary Net SapienT Technology to survey the extent and growth of the web, they estimated that there were 2 billion unique, publicly accessible pages on the Internet in July of 2000.   Additionally, they found that 7.3 million unique new pages were going on the net each day. In the same paper, Cyveillance predicted that there would be 4 billion publicly available pages on the Internet by early 2001. Cyveillance emphasized that their technology was able to estimate growth, an improvement over just taking a static snapshot. Their results indicted that the Internet was growing dynamically and had yet to peak. Cyveillance's most recent statistics indicate about 6 billion web pages are on the public web.  

A more conservative estimate is offered by the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Office of Research) in a recent report called Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web . This report sums up the results of a survey that has been conducted annually since 1998.   OCLC uses a different sampling methodology than Cyveillance.com. Consequently their numbers differ significantly. According to the results of the Web Characterization Project's most recent survey, the public web (those pages freely available to everyone), contained 3,080,000 Web sites, or 35 percent of the Web as a whole. Public sites accounted for approximately 1.4 billion Web pages. The average size of a public web site was 441 pages. ( Statistics current for June 2002.)

It is also important to understand what we mean by the phrase 'publicly accessible web pages'. The OCLC attempted to count public web pages housed on a public website. They provide this definition: "A public Web site offers to all Web users free, unrestricted access to a significant portion of its content." Many pages on the Internet remain out of reach unless you are willing to pay.

Cartoon Image of a computer reading from paper text. Listen


Note: Multimedia Materials open in a new window. Download and install the latest Macromedia Flash Player to use the video or audio materials.

Authored by Dennis O'Connor 2003-2004