I'm looking for an up-to-date reference for how many sites are on the Internet. I've tried Clickz, Pew Internet, etc., but with no success. I've seen a figure of 1 billion Websites, but do not know where this figure came from. Anybody got hard info.?
I think the dispute about how to count what -- ie what? a Web site? what's that -- is long-running, but I guess that Netcraft has been at this while. They have apparently seen about 51m sites (http://www.netcraft.com/?host). What they mean by sites is not totally clear. They say that "the number of hosts found running internet web sites by the Web Server Survey is large [over 40 million in April 2003]". The 40m (now presumably 51m) could refer to the number of unique hosts (boxen), or to the number of unique IP addresses they host, or the number of "Internet Web sites" hosted on those -- each of which is presumably a larger figure than the previous one. Though the ISC Domain Survey's having found 250m live IP address with domain names attached probably helps figure it out. But perhaps the good folks at Netcraft would like to tell us... cheers Bram