Posted: 28th Jul, 2008 By: MarkJ
Google has revealed that there are now over 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web. This compares with the first Google index in 1998, which was home to 26 million and topped 1 billion by 2000.
In related news, China has topped the USA by connecting over 253 million people to the Internet during June 2008. This compares with the USAs 223+ million for the same period. This is despite Chinas Internet penetration rate being just 19% compared to the USAs 71%, suggesting that China has plenty of room to grow.
Google Blog Post: "
Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer."
The Internet is BIG.