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The Internet Now has Over 100 Million Web Sites

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Nov 01, 2006 04:35 PM
from the and-most-of-it-is-porn dept.
The Internet News
1sockchuck writes "There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, according to Netcraft, whose monthly web server survey has reached 101.4 million sites. From the article: 'The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.'" This is a far cry from the August 1995 results that just cleared 18,000.
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  • Ridiculous! (Score:5, Funny)

    by KidHash (766864) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:38PM (#16680151) Homepage
    Nobody could need more than 640 websites...
    • No, really, 3 computers should satisfy the world's computing needs...
    • OK there have been some great services and sites that have come into being in the last ten years. However, it is very hard to see that 100 million sites == a whole lot of value. There are probably way less than 1 million sites that have content worth checking out. The rest is just Goobage.

      Every crap site added makes for more jusk that makes it harder to find anything worthwhile.

    • Re:Ridiculous! (Score:4, Funny)

      by gwyrdd benyw (233417) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @05:23PM (#16680975) Journal
      I still remember the good old days when the web was first born, and I had the (realistic!) goal of visiting every single web page in existence...

      • Re:Ridiculous! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by eln (21727) * on Wednesday November 01 2006, @05:43PM (#16681313) Homepage
        Ah yes, back when a person's favorite links were his "Hot List," and he put them online because his browser didn't have a bookmark function (and oh yeah, so other people could see them too I guess), and when a "blog" was known as a "personal home page." Back when I could teach a whole class everything there was to know about HTML in one day. Back when 99% of the sites on the Internet were "under construction."

        My first website (other than the ubiquitous "rants" page) was basically a collection of Monty Python scripts I ripped off of gopher sites and HTML-ized. Back then, I actually got mentioned on one of those "cool site of the day" pages. These days I'd probably just get sued.
      • I imagine the same proportion of sites are still worth visiting.
        Do you mean proportion or absolute number?
  • Netcraft has also released new information that the internet now has 999,956,522 pornographic websites currently.

    Happy browsing everyone!
    • Yet another crippling bombshell hit the BSD community today. It is official, of the 100,000,000 websites, 999,956,522 of them are pornographic. The other 43478 non-pornographic websites are all running BSD and are dying. Film at 11:00

      (Sorry, can't resist when it comes to Netcraft)
          • Acceptable.

            We would have also accepted:

            Well, for large sums of 2 it works.
            What are you, the addition police.
  • Is the fact that that of those 100 million, *at least* 99 million are porn sites.

    God Bless the Internet.
  • ...we had over 100,000 BBS's! You kids and your new-fangled internet...
    • ...we had over 100,000 BBS's! You kids and your new-fangled internet...
      When the first public dialup internet provider opened in my local calling area, the BBS scene died immediately. I'm still somewhat bitter over that. The internet never really replaced all that bulletin boards had to offer.


  • Mmm, the memories. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vegard (11855) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:42PM (#16680265)
    I remember when the "google equivalent" was a web page with all the worlds web servers was listed. It rapidly got divided into one page per country....
    • Didn't they once have a web form to submit your site in order to get it listed, period?

      /P

      • The first one I can think of was called "What's New?" Eventually they stopped accepting every single submission. I forget if they started requiring money to be listed or if it was some other criteria... I think they just stopped accepting personal websites.

        Then Yahoo came along and would list anybody equally, with all their categories and subcategories... they stopped taking just anybody, too.

        A couple of friends of mine started a business selling websites (both the servers and building the sites). The co

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SETIGuy (33768)
      Here's a subset of my .mosaic-hotlist-default which still sits in my home directory. Frankly, I'm amazed at how many have evolved into something else.
      • http://sunsite.unc.edu/ianc/ Tue Feb 15 12:46:13 1994 Internet Underground Music Archive
      • http://www.cs.colorado.edu/homes/mcbryan/public_ html/bb/summary.html Tue Feb 15 16:20:03 1994 The Mother-of-all BBS
      • http://adswww.colorado.edu/adswww/adshomepg.html Fri Feb 18 13:17:54 1994 Astrophysics Data System Home Page
      • http://nearnet.gnn.com/gnn/gnn.html Tue Apr
  • ...how many of them are ad/pr0n/phishing-laden cybersquats, how many are "my first webpage" single-page sites, how many contain the default IIS or Apache test pages, how many are toss-off political candidate or jumped-the-shark-by-now specialty (e.g. Kerry 2004 campaign) websites, etc? In short, how many of them are actual, funct^M usable, ongoing websites? That's what I want to know.

    /P

    • " jumped-the-shark-by-now specialty (e.g. Kerry 2004 campaign"

      "I jumped the shark, and then I didnt jump the shark".

  • Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:43PM (#16680285)
    The internet did not just reach 100 million sites - Netcraft's crawl reached 100 million sites.
    The internet didn't double in size since 2004 - Netcraft's crawl doubled in size since 2004.

  • actual sites? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by countach (534280) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:44PM (#16680309)
    50 million more sites or 50 million more domain name squatters?
  • from the and-most-of-it-is-porn dept.

    Funny ha ha, but a lot of folks would accept that statement at face value. At this point, measured in Netcraft's metric of "number of web sites", it would be interesting to know what most of the Internet actually *is*. Blogs? Personal sites? Phishnets?

    If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the biggest category of "active web site" is the typosquatters [slashdot.org].
  • How on earth could they ever claim this is an accurate number? The whole world is moving in the direction of name-based virtual hosting. One IP could potentially host thousands of web pages, all with different domain names.
    • Counting the number of registered domains? Surely that's what the low-level employees of ICANN do all day long...
      • Actually, I could write a perl script that could count all the registered domains if I was ICANN. No need for a low level employee. Oh, except to write the script.
      • You can do that for second-level domains, but not reliably for anything lower in the tree.

  • Web sites are not 'The Internet' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScentCone (795499) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:48PM (#16680375)
    The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million

    How can an article citing Netcraft stats, submitted by a nerd, and approved by a nerd, get this basic concept wrong? The phone I used today was part of the internet. This week, I added half a dozen web sites to an existing box, on an existing single IP address. "The Web" and "The Internet" aren't the same thing. At all.
    • I would also add the fact that 1 domain can have multiple websites and multiple domains can serve the same website, so I wouldn't say that that domain and websites are always the same thing.
  • How many of these "new" domains are those horrible "parked domains" that advertise their own sale and link to other sites (presumably to lift their google ranking)?

  • Well, I won't believe it until... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Overzeetop (214511) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @04:54PM (#16680487) Journal
    ...Netcraft confirms it.

    Oh. Whoops.

  • How are they counting. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cwinfough (1021427) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @05:04PM (#16680671)
    Are they counting unique sites ie "http://www.yourname.com" and "http://www.joe.yourname.com" or are they just counting primary domain names? :>
  • Sheer count is nothing. Its sort of like counting cars.. sure there may be a mind boggling amount of them, but how many of those are actually drivable and arent sitting in a junk yard?
  • My question is, how many of these sites are phishing sites?
  • So year over year there something like 40-50% growth in the number of sites. The question is why? Do we all wake up in the morning thinking, "I wish there were more websites!"

    This just reflects that more people are coming up with more ideas that include having their own little piece o' web. It's not important how many ideas people have or how many domains they run. It's how much time humanity is spending online that matters. It's how much good the internet is doing for us. Just wanted to point out the num
    • > So year over year there something like 40-50% growth in the number of sites. The question is why?

      You have questions.... and since I ain't Radio Shack I have more than blank stares for ya. :)

      Blogs. Microsoft, Google and a lot more bit players are in a race to see how many domains they can host for free. And these days they don't call em personal homepages (that is so 20th Century and conjures up visions of crapy geocities pages) anymore, now we call them blogs. Plus Microsoft gets to boost their netc

  • The Internet Now has Over 100 Million Web Sites... (Score:4, Informative)

    by MSTCrow5429 (642744) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @06:18PM (#16681777)
    ..and 99.99 million of them are crap.
  • ... I bet a good half of them are spam domains, used to pump Google ranks, host tens of thousands of /search-terms/ folders, and otherwise useless sites with little to no content.

    The quantity of CONTENT on the Internet has little to do with the number of domains hosted. In fact, the number of domains is pretty irrelevant, since it seems the bittorrent protocol hosts more actual content nowadays than the http protocol.
    • Internet2 is not a replacement for or sequel to the Internet. It's a private network of universities, research facilites, and the like. In that regard, it's something of a throwback to what the Internet was in the very beginning. Check out the wikipeida page [wikipedia.org] on the subject.
    • "Imminent Death of the Net" has been predicted so many times, it even has its own entry in some computing dictionaries [thefreedictionary.com]

      Don't worry, the net has survived everything that's been thrown at it, I doubt a few more doublings in website numbers is going to affect it...

    • 99,999,999 porn sites and one website that only says, "Bring back the Porn", encase they took all the porn off the net.
      • Alright. Everyone join in now.

        One, two, three...

        o/~ The Internet is for porn. The Internet is for porn. Grab your dick and double click for porn, porn, porn. o/~

      • Actually, 50 million "active" sites out of 100 million total really amazes me, if true.

        I wonder what percentage of the 100 million are A) domain squatting link tubs, and/or B) dead blogs.

    • AC, you say that like it's a bad thing. Blog/News Aggregators rock! Slashdot, as you mentioned is one, as is YouTube. My favourites besides those big ones are here in Canada with me, at Progressivebloggers.ca [progressivebloggers.ca] and the Saskblogs Aggregator [catprint.ca].

      Aggregators, like Fark.com and the others mentioned help widdle down the 101,000,001 webpages out there, to something someone can hope to consume in a day. It will one day change television as we know it, and give the neighbour and their dog as big an online presence as eB
        • You're right that there is a certain level of repetitiveness, and less "creation". But aggregators are still a good way for someone to find the creators of content, and first hand accounts of the news. If it weren't for fark, and slashdot, thousands of important news makers on the Internet throughout the year would go unnoticed to most users.

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