How Big is the Web?
Internet 'Facts and Figures'

By Mark Sceats

A comment about Internet ‘facts and figures’

If you’re looking for facts and figures about the Internet you’ll quickly realise that there seem to be as many different figures on a given topic as there are surveys.

This can be a bit perplexing if you’re looking for definitive figures. If you are, give up - you won’t find them. As the saying goes - "lies, damn lies, and (Internet) statistics..."

How Big Is The Web? 

This question is frequently asked by businesses when considering using the Web as a marketing tool.

There is a big range of estimates concerning the size of the Web. Measurements include the number of people online; the number of domains; and the number of web pages. All have shown exponential growth. A study released way back in July 2000 by business intelligence company Cyveillance gave the following figures:

Size and Growth of the Internet (as at July 2000):

• Number of unique publicly accessible pages on Internet: 2.1 billion
• Unique pages added per day: 7.3 million

Using this historic growth of the Internet, Cyveillance estimated that the number of Web pages would have doubled to 4 billion by early 2001.

You may be wondering why I'm not quoting more recent figures...if you can find some please let me know. (It seems few analysts are prepared to speculate a figure these days).

Certainly we are talking billions of pages. Google alone has indexed over 8 billion pages - and that's the tip of the iceberg (see The Deep Web notes below). The reality is nobody really knows for sure how many pages there are on the Web - whatever the figure is it's enormous.

The Deep Web

According to a whitepaper published by BrightPlanet there are two groups of Web content. One, which they call the "surface" Web is what everybody knows as the "Web," a group that consists of static, publicly available web pages, and which is a relatively small portion of the entire Web.

Another group is called the "deep" Web, and it consists of specialized Web-accessible databases and dynamic web sites, which are not widely known by "average" surfers, even though the information available on the "deep" Web is 400 to 550 times larger than the information on the "surface".

BrightPlanet estimated that, as at March 2000 the deep Web contained nearly 550 billion individual documents, compared to the one billion of the surface Web.

Search engines' ability to crawl and index dynamic websites has increased since BrightPlanet published its whitepaper.  Google has indexed more pages than any other search engine. As at Jan 2005 Google had indexed over 8 billion pages. (You can check the current count which is listed next to the copyright notice beneath the Google search box, as below).

Despite the impressive ongoing efforts by Google and other search engines the number of pages currently indexed by search engines is still far short of the total pages on the Web.

Google isn't resting on its laurels and has some lofty ambitions. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has been quoted in USA Today as saying "I don't know if it will happen, but we hope to have the whole Web crawled." Of course how much they add to their index is another matter...

What Does It All Mean?

Fixating about exact numbers is pointless – everything you read is an estimate. No one knows for sure how just big the web is or how many people are online. The key point is to recognise that most numbers are BIG and growing. As such it’s not a medium many businesses can afford to ignore.

If you do want to delve into Internet related statistics then 5 good places to start (and get all sorts of conflicting statistics) are:

Iconoclast
CyberAtlas
eMarketer
Nua Internet Surveys
Online Computer Library Center

Now let’s look at some of the methods available to proactively market your business online: Next topic: Search Engine Marketing

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This page last updated May 03, 2010