Every once in awhile I like to “data dive” with the hopes of uncovering some factoid relevant to a question. Today is one of those days and the question I wanted to answer was “how big is the world wide web”? As is the case with any broadly defined question, there are numerous sources from which one can extract a myriad of answers. For our purpose though, we’ll focused on a few sources which will be identified shortly. So let’s go…
The World Wide Web by Active Domains: 112,583,548 (Alexa.com, Oct. 26, 2009)
Domains can be thought of as the address on a store front or house. They come in seven flavors, .com, .net, .info, .org, .edu, .gov, .biz.
• The Number One Alexa Ranked website is Google.com. Google gets (on average) 7% of the daily U.S. traffic or about 4.8 million visitors (Hitwise.com, July 2009). By contrast, October-Design’s Alexa Rank is 23,089,903 and gets on average 7 visitors a day.
The Number of Internet Users, World Wide: 1,668,870,408 (InternetWorldStats.com, Oct. 26th, 2009)
- China – 338 million
- US – 227 million
- Japan – 94 million
- India – 81 million
- Brazil – 67 million
- Germany – 55 million
- UK – 48 million
- France – 42 million
- Russia – 38 million
- S. Korea – 27 million
• The highest percent of population with Internet Access is the U.K. with 79.8% having access;
the U.S. is second with 74.1%
and Japan is third with 74% of its’ population having Internet Access.
Estimated Number of “Indexed” Documents On the World Wide Web: 21.44 billion documents indexed (Oct 26, 09)
The key word is “indexed” which is the act of search engines reading a documents content and storing its information. It has been estimated that there are over 1 trillion documents online. However, not all documents are accessible through search engines or been indexed, nor do they have public facing hyperlinks.
Now for some analog world comparisons (just for fun):
• Population of New York City: 8,143,197
• Est. Number of Businesses in NYC: 485,000
• New York City is the United State’s largest regional economy and the worlds second largest city economy after Tokyo, Japan.
• New York City region represents $1.2 trillion of economic activity (2008 conference of Mayors); the 2008 total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the U.S. was $14.2 trillion (Source: U.S. Department of Commerce).
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