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114 Part 1 Introduction

Although the Internet was subsequently extended worldwide and was used extensively by
academic and defence communities, it has only recently been catapulted into mainstream
business and consumer use. Activity 3.2 examines this relatively slow development.
It is the advent of the World Wide Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN to
help share research easily, that is responsible for the massive growth in business use of the Inter-
net. (See Berners-Lee (1999) for a description of the invention of the web.) The World Wide
Web provides a publishing medium which makes it easy to publish and read information using
a web browser and also to link to related information. (See section Web Technology p. 124.)

Just how big is the Internet?

In Chapter 4, we will see that, according to the ClickZ compilations (www.clickz.com/stats/),
there are over one billion Internet users worldwide; but how big is the infrastructure they
are accessing? One measure is the number of web servers. Netcraft has regularly surveyed the
servers since 1995 to give a picture of the growth of the Internet through time (Figure 3.5).
The first survey it ran, launched in 1995, found only 18,957 sites, but by August 2008, there
were 176 million! Note that Netcraft measures registered domains or Internet IP addresses
(explained later in this chapter). Some of these domains may not be active with regularly
updated content, as the chart shows.
Another way at looking at the scale of the Internet is to look at the number of pages
indexed by search engines.

Google Indexes 1 trillion URLs equivalent to 50,000 times larger than the US road network
A good indication of the size of the web is the number of pages indexed by Google. The first
index by Google in 1998 found 26 million pages (Figure 1.1).
Google doesn’t index every page since many pages are duplicates or ‘web spam’ used to
mislead the search engine and its users in the rankings. However, the number of pages vis-
ited by its main crawler or robot GoogleBot reached over 1 trillion in 2008 according to
Google (2008). That’s 1,000,000,000,000 pages!

178000000
160200000 Hostnames
Active
142400000

124600000
106800000
89000000
71200000
53400000
35600000
17800000
0
1995 1996 1996 1997 1997 1998 1998 1999 1999 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 2003 2004 2004 2005 2005 2006 2006 2007 2007 2008 2008

Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Nov May Aug

The Netcraft index of number of servers
Figure 3.5 Source: Netcraft web Server Survey.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html. Netcraft.