How big is the Internet?
From 1985 to January 1994, the Internet has grown from about 200 networks to well over 21,000 and from 1,000 hosts (end-user computers) to over two million. About 640,000 of these hosts are at educational sites, 520,000 are commercial sites, and about 220,000 are government/military sites, while most of the other 700,000 hosts are elsewhere in the world. NSFNET traffic has grown from 85 million packets in January 1988 to 46 billion packets in December 1993. (A packet is about 200 bytes, and a byte corresponds to one ASCII character.) This is more than a five hundred-fold increase in only six years. The traffic on the network is currently increasing at a rate of 6% a month.
Good question. To give you an idea, when Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President there were 200 domain hosts in use (200 numeric addresses in use and only eight (8) of them ended in .com or .net! As of January 1, 2004 there were 194,000,000 domain hosts in use. Try our FREE SEO Analysis! Please check out Metamend’s Internet Marketing services. Major search engines such as Google, Inktomi, FAST and AltaVista are always competing for the title of largest index. It’s not just a matter of prestige. A larger index offers users hope of finding obscure facts, but they don’t guarantee quality of results. The following tables show how many pages the major search engines and directories each claim to index. • AltaVista 1.689 billion pages. • FAST 2.106 billion pages. • Google 3.083 billion pages. • Inktomi 1.600 billion pages. • Wisenut 1.453 billion pages. Figures courtesy of Search Engine Showdown What Do These Numbers Really Mean? They show the number of web pages indexed. Not the number of
Assessing the size of the Internet is a somewhat difficult proposition, since it is a distributed body, and no complete index of it exists. What we mean by asking how large the Internet is also plays into how we answer the question. Do we mean how many people use the Internet? How many websites are on the Internet? How many bytes of data are contained on the Internet? How many distinct servers operate on the Internet? How much traffic runs through the Internet per second? All of these different metrics could conceivably be used to address the sheer size of the Internet, but all are very different. Perhaps the simplest metric is simply how many people use the Internet. This can be viewed as the population of the Internet, and so would seem to be a decent gauge of its size. Many different companies try to measure Internet usage, ranging from Nielsen Ratings to the Office of the CIA to Serverwatch. The general answer seems to be that just over a billion people used the Internet in 2008. O
