[Air-l] Re: How Many Sites on Web?

[Bram Dov Abramson]

> 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