BBC Blog Network

User Profile

boboshady

Listed below are comments made by boboshady between Tuesday, 29th July 2008 and Tuesday, 29th July 2008.

«Newer
Older»

Just how big is the web? 02:33am on 29 Jul 2008 Don't forget that a URL is not the same as a 'website'. For instance, I have a website, it's got maybe 20 or 30 pages on it, thus I have 20 or 30 unique URLs.

A URL is the unique identifier for a page, so news.bbc.co.uk/thisstory is a different URL to news.bbc.co.uk/thatstory.

Taking the BBC News website as an example, it's got thousands of pages. Now include all those other sites of a similar size. Now keep on working down the sites you visit, estimating the amount of pages (URLs) for each, until you get back to mine - a very small site, with only 30.

Sure, there's a lot of websites out there, but not a trillion. It's just a lot of websites, each of which contribute 20, 30 or a few thousand unique URLs to that figure.

As a side note, there's plenty of sites out there that will never report a 'page not found' error, due mostly to the naughty tactics of the webmasters, and as such would report a unique URL when in fact no page actually existed. You could probably only attribute a couple of billion to that tactic, though!

«Newer
Older»

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites