Ever wondered how big the world wide web is?
Well, Google thinks they have an idea. Their search engineers reckon there are now more than one trillion unique URLs live on the web right now, marking a new milestone.
There's a bit more detail here. And of course by the time you read this, there are many, many more new URLs.
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Is it possible to plot where all those pages are hosted? Might be a visually overpowering image to see the virtual world from space 'illuminated' in North America and Europe and in darkness everywhere else... Q
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It's not quite geographical, but they did have a bash at visualising the internet:
http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/com_test/img%5Cdsnl%5Cinternet15jan06.png
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The information security guy at my company tells me that roughly half of the sites on the internet are pornography - half of a trillion pages sure is a lot....
Even if its only 20%, sure looks quite a bit less impressive when you consider whats in that trillion. What would be more interesting might be a split of how many pages actually contribute to the growth of humanity versus how many could disappear and make the world a better place
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tolstoy99: Pornography disappearing would make the world a better place?
I think many people would disagree with that!
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Companies can quite easily track down the bad website that do not contribute to humanity, instead harming it.... but ofcourse can someone please tell me where the money is in that?
Thats the big problem, the internet will always recruit terrorists because capitalist ideologies have the power these days
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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!
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