Internet monitoring company has announced that late last month the web passed a significant milestone: 100 million web sites.But wait... 100 million? So few? Surely there can't be only 100 million web sites out there! Ah, but let's take a closer look at what Netcraft considers a web site: "There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," says Netcraft's Rich Miller. Ah, there's the rub: According to Netcraft, it's only a web site if it has its own domain name and has content on it. The latter part I think we can all agree with--this excludes, presumably, blank pages, registrar parking pages, Google ad farms, and the like. But what about the domain name thing? There are tens of millions of Blogspot blogs out there, for example, but since they're all on .blogspot.com, Netcraft is counting them all as one. The same goes for every other blog host, and every web site living at Geocities or a similar host. 100 million web sites my butt.
Still, it's an interesting milestone. When Netcraft started counting back in 1995 there were only 18,000 web sites in existence. A hundred million domain-names-with-content in the 17 years since the World Wide Web's birth? If that's not something to marvel at, I don't know what is.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-01-2006 @ 5:19PM
Dave said...
that is surely an ass-load of servers. Where is that picture from?
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11-01-2006 @ 8:07PM
adam said...
Dave -
Any standard 'co-lo' would have many more servers than that. That image demonstrates a fraction of what most 'server farms' hold.
adam
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11-02-2006 @ 1:17AM
Scott said...
If you actually search for "websites" containing .blogspot.com on Netcraft:
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=.blogspot.com
You'll see that they are actually counted as individual sites. As far as I know, a "website" from Netcraft's point of view must have a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), i.e. an unique host name.
I guess the example you should use is Xanga, where individual Xanga users don't have their own hostname -- everyone goes under www.xanga.com/username. That would only be counted as one website I guess. Same applies to many other blogging services that put users under sub-directories instead of unique hostname.
Still, I don't think 100 million is "a few". I can't even imagine myself reading 1 million websites.
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11-10-2006 @ 8:53PM
Jay said...
The problem with counting every www.hostingcompany.tld/username as a separate website is that it would count MySpace and other such sites as collections of millions of websites rather than one website. Better to keep their definition.
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