Internet Statistics: Explanation and Sources

Internet Statistics: Explanation and Sources

Order Code RL31270
Report for Congress
Received through the CRS Web
Internet Statistics: Explanation and Sources
Updated April 22, 2003
Rita Tehan
Information Research Specialist
Information Research Division
Congressional Research Service ˜ The Library of Congress

Internet Statistics: Explanation and Sources
Summary
Congress may play a vital role in many Internet policy decisions, including
whether Congress should legislate the amount of personally identifiable information
that Web site operators collect and share; whether high-speed Internet access should
be regulated; whether unsolicited e-mail (“spam”) should be restricted; and whether
Congress should oversee computer security cooperation between the federal
government and private industry.
The breadth of these issues demonstrates the Internet’s importance to American
society and its economy. Because of this, it is important to quantify the Internet’s
influence statistically. This is not always easy, because there are a number of factors
which make it difficult to measure the Internet. Since there is no central registry of
all Internet users, completing a census or attempting to contact every user of the
Internet is neither practical nor financially feasible. However, several entities track
various aspects of the Internet’s configuration, usage, and growth. In evaluating
statistics, it is important to understand how they are compiled, how they are used, and
what their limitations are. This report will be updated as necessary.

Contents
Significance of the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Difficulties in Measuring Internet Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Number of Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Estimated Size of the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Number of Web Sites (Domain Names) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Number of Web Hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Number of Web Sites and Web Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Web Characterization Project (OCLC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Alexa Internet Web Crawl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Internet Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Other Research Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Invisible Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Selected Web Addresses for Internet Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
List of Tables
Table 1. Internet Hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Internet Statistics: Explanation and Sources
Significance of the Internet
The Internet’s growth is of concern to Congress because the Internet is now a
significant force in American life. Congress may play a vital role in many Internet
policy decisions, including whether Congress should legislate the amount of
personally identifiable information that Web site operators collect and share; whether
high-speed Internet access should be regulated; whether unsolicited e-mail (“spam”)
should be restricted; and whether Congress should oversee computer security
cooperation between the federal government and private industry. The breadth of
these issues demonstrates the Internet’s importance to American society and its
economy. Because of this, it is important to quantify the Internet’s influence
statistically. This is not always easy, because there are a number of factors which
make it difficult to measure the Internet. In evaluating statistics, it is important to
understand how they are compiled, how they are used, and what their limitations are.
Difficulties in Measuring Internet Usage
The Internet presents a unique problem for surveying users. Since there is no
central registry of all Internet users, completing a census or attempting to contact
every user of the Internet is neither practical nor financially feasible. Internet usage
surveys attempt to answer questions about all users by selecting a subset to
participate in a survey. This process is called sampling. At the heart of the issue is
the methodology used to collect responses from individual users.
The following discussion of survey methodologies is excerpted from the
Georgia Institute of Technology’s GVU’s World Wide Web User Survey Background
Information Web page.1
There are two types of sampling, random and non-probabilistic. Random
sampling creates a sample using a random process for selecting members from
the entire population. Since each person has an equal chance of being selected
for the sample, results obtained from measuring the sample can be generalized
to the entire population. Non-probabilistic sampling is not a pure random
selection process, and can introduce bias into the sampling selection process
because, for example, there is a desire for convenience or expediency. With non-
probabilistic sampling, it is difficult to guarantee that certain portions of the
population were not excluded from the sample, since elements do not have an
equal chance of being selected.
1 “GVU’s WWW User Survey Background Information.” Graphics, Visualization &
U s a b i l i t y C e n t e r , G e o r g i a I n s t i t u t e o f T e c h n o l o g y a t
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/].

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Since Internet users are spread out all over the world, it becomes quite difficult
to select users from the entire population at random. To simplify the problem,
most surveys of the Internet focus on a particular region of users, which is
typically the United States, though surveys of European, Asian, and Oceanic
users have also been conducted. Still, the question becomes how to contact users
and get them to participate. The traditional methodology is to use random digit
dialing (RDD). While this ensures that the phone numbers and thus the users are
selected at random, it potentially suffers from other problems as well, notably,
self-selection.

Self-selection occurs when the entities in the sample are given a choice to
participate. If a set of members in the sample decides not to participate, it
reduces the ability of the results to be generalized to the entire population. This
decrease in the confidence of the survey occurs since the group that decided not
to participate may differ in some manner from the group that participated. It is
important to note that self-selection occurs in nearly all surveys of people. Thus,
conventional means of surveying Internet usage are subject to error.
Another difficulty in measuring Internet usage is partly due to the fact that
analysts use different survey methods and different definitions of “Internet access.”
For example, some companies begin counting Internet surfers at age two, while
others begin at 16 or 18. Some researchers include users who have been on the Web
only within the past month, while others include people who have never used the
Internet.2 In addition, definitions of “active users” varies from one market research
firm to another. Some companies count Internet users over 15 years old who surf the
Web at least once every two weeks for any amount of time. Other companies count
casual surfers or e-mail browsers in their surveys. To compare forecasts, estimates
need to be adjusted for differing definitions of Internet use and population figures.
Number of Users
Most of the statistics gathered during the early days of the Internet only
concerned the number of hosts connected to the Internet or the amount of traffic
flowing over the backbones. Such statistics were usually collected by large
universities or government agencies on behalf of the research and scientific
community, who were the largest users of the Internet at the time. This changed in
1991 when the National Science Foundation lifted its restrictions on the commercial
use of the Internet. More businesses began to realize the commercial opportunities
of the Internet, and the demand for an accurate accounting of the Internet’s
population increased.
The UCLA Internet Report 2003, Surveying the Digital Future, provides a
comprehensive year-to-year view of the impact of the Internet by examining the
behavior and views of a national sample of 2,000 Internet users and nonusers, as well
as comparisons between new users (less than one year of experience) and very
2 David Lake, “Spotlight: How Big Is the U.S. Net Population?” The Standard, Nov. 29,
1999.

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experienced users (five or more years of experience).3 Among the report’s findings:
71.1% of Americans have some type of online access, up from 66.9% in 2000. Users
go online an average of 11.1 hours per week, an increase from 9.8 hours in 2001.
A study by Nielsen/Net Ratings which measured the Internet populations in 30
countries estimates that over 580 million people in 27 nations have Internet access.
It reports that the United States has the largest Internet population, accounting for
29% of the global access universe, down from 40% in the first quarter of 2002.
Twenty-three percent of the total is in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, followed
by the Asia-Pacific region’s 13% and Latin America’s 2%. Markets not under
Nielsen//NetRatings measurement account for the remaining 33%.4
According to the December 2002 The Face of the Web 2002, an annual study
of Internet trends by international research firm Ipsos-Reid, the United States
continues to have the highest level of Internet use among 12 countries surveyed.
Some 72% of American adults reported having gone online at least once in the
previous 30 days.5
In February 2002, the Department of Commerce released a report, A Nation
Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet, which estimated
that 143 million Americans (about 54% of the population) were using the Internet.6
The Census Bureau began tracking Internet usage in 1997. In September 2001,
it released the results of an August 2000 survey, which revealed that 42% of all U.S.
households could log on to the Internet in 2000, up from 18% in 1997. Over half of
the country’s 105 million households have computers.7 (The data should not be
confused with results from Census 2000, which did not include questions on
computer access and Internet use.)
In September 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics included a supplement to the
Current Population Survey (CPS). Respondents to the supplement answered
3 “Surveying the Digital Future: The UCLA Internet Report Year Three,” UCLA Center for
Communication Policy, Feb. 2003.
See [http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/pages/NewsTopics.asp?Id=35].
4 “Global Net Population Increases,” Nielsen Net-Ratings press release, Feb. 20, 2003.
See [http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_030220.pdf].
“Population Explosion! (Global Online Populations),” CyberAtlas, Mar. 14, 2003. See
[http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geographics/article/0,,5911_151151,00.html].
5 “Internet Use Continues to Climb in Most Markets,” Ipsos-Reid press release, Dec. 10,
2002. See [http://www.angusreid.com/search/pdf/media/mr021210%2D1revis.pdf].
6 “A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet,” National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, Feb. 2002. See
[http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dn/nationonline_020502.htm].
7 “Home Computers and Internet Use in the United States: August 2000,” U.S. Bureau of
the Census, Sep. 6, 2001. See the report and press release at the Computer Use and
Ownership/Current Population Survey Reports (CPS August 2000) page at
[http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/computer.html].

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questions about computer and Internet use at home, school, and work, in addition to
other information. The survey revealed that 72.3 million persons used a computer
at work. These workers accounted for 53.5 % of total employment. Of this number,
about two of every five persons used the Internet or e-mail on the job.8
Estimated Size of the Internet
Estimates of the present size and growth rate of the Internet also vary widely,
in part based on what measurement is defined and used. Several of the most common
indicators are
! Domain name—the part of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that tells a
domain name server where to forward a request for a Web page. The domain
name is mapped to an Internet Protocol (IP) address (which represents a
physical point on the Internet).
! Host computer—any computer that has full two-way access to other
computers on the Internet. A host has a specific “local or host number” that,
together with the network number, forms its unique IP address.
! Web host—a company in the business of providing server space, Web
services, and file maintenance for Web sites controlled by individuals or
companies that do not have their own Web servers.
! Web page—a file written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Usually,
it contains text and specifications about where image or other multimedia files
are to be placed when the page is displayed. The first page requested at a site
is known as the home page.
Number of Web Sites (Domain Names)
One problem in measuring the size of the Internet is that many domain names
are unused. An individual or organization might buy one or more domain names
with the intention of building a Web site; other individuals or companies buy
hundreds or thousands of domain names in the hope of reselling them. These
domains can be found with search engines or Web crawlers, but their content is
nonexistent or negligible.
Another reason it is difficult to count the number of Web domains is that some
sites are merely synonyms for other sites. In other words, many domain names point
to the exact same site. For example, newyorktimes.com and nyt.com both point to the
same site. And finally, some sites are mirror sites, which are exact duplicates of the
original site on another server. Usually, these are created to reduce network traffic,
ensure better availability of the Web site, or make the site download more quickly for
users close to the mirror site (i.e., in another part of the world from the original site).
8 “Computer and Internet Use at Work in 2001,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of
Labor Statistics press release, Oct. 23, 2002.
See [http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ciuaw.toc.htm].

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Number of Web Hosts
The Internet is now growing at a rate of about 40% to 50% annually (for
machines physically connected to the Internet), according to data from the Internet
Domain Survey, the longest-running survey of Internet host computers (machines
connected to the Internet). Such exponential growth has led to the expansion of the
Internet from 562 connected host computers in 1983 to 171.6 million such computers
in January 2003.9
Another way to think about growth in Internet access is to compare it to other
technologies from the past. It took 38 years for the telephone to penetrate 30% of
U.S. households. Television took 17 years to become that available. Personal
computers took 13 years. Once the Internet became popular because of the World
Wide Web, it took less than seven years to reach a 30% penetration level.10
Although the number of people using the Internet can only be estimated, the
number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately. A host computer is any
computer that has full two-way access to other computers on the Internet. These
figures do not include military computers, which for security reasons are invisible to
other users. Many hosts support multiple users, and hosts in some organizations
support hundreds or thousands of users. The growth of Internet hosts is shown in
Table 1.
Table 1. Internet Hosts
Date
Number of Internet Hosts
1969
4
April 1971
23
August 1981
213
August 1983
562
October 1990
313,000
July 1991
535,000
July 1992
992,000
July 1993
1,776,000
July 1994
2,217,000
July 1995
6,642,000
January 1996
9,472,000
January 1997
17,753,266
January 1998
29,670,000
9 Internet Domain Survey, Jan. 2003, “Number of Hosts Advertised in the DNS,” See
[http://www.isc.org/ds/WWW-200301/index.html].
10 “Number of Years it Took for Major Companies to Reach 50% of American Homes”
(chart), Consumer’s Research, July 2000, p. 20.

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Date
Number of Internet Hosts
January 1999
43,230,000
January 2000
72,398,092
January 2001
109,574,429
January 2002
147,344,723
January 2003
171,638,297
Notes: The Internet Domain Survey attempts to discover every
host on the Internet by doing a complete search of the Domain
Name System (DNS). It is sponsored by the Internet Software
Consortium, whose technical operations are subcontracted to
Network Wizards. Survey results are available from
[http://www.isc.org/ds/WWW-200301/index.html].
Packet traffic, a measure of the amount of data flowing over the network,
continues to increase exponentially. Traffic and capacity of the Internet grew at rates
of about 100% per year in the early 1990s. There was then a brief period of
explosive growth in 1995 and 1996. Prior to 1996, most people relied on National
Science Foundation (NSF) statistics which were publicly available. However, as the
Internet grew, the percentage of traffic accounted for by the NSF backbone declined,
so that data became a less reliable indicator over time. Since the NSFnet shut its
doors in 1996, there has been no reliable and publicly available source of Internet
packet traffic statistics.11 Most network operators do not divulge their traffic
statistics, for proprietary reasons.
Certain experts once estimated that Internet traffic doubled every three or four
months, for a growth rate of 1,000% per year. For a claim that is so dramatic and
quoted so widely, there have been no hard data to substantiate it. This figure is
probably a result of a misunderstanding of a claim in a May 1998 Upside magazine
article by John Sidgemore, then CEO of UUNet (now WorldCom), claiming that the
bandwidth of UUNet’s Internet links was increasing 10-fold each year (implying a
doubling every three or four months). Growth of capacity in one of the Internet’s
core backbones cannot explain the growth rate of the Internet as a whole.12
An August 2001 article in Broadband World surveyed five Internet experts on
the subject of Internet growth.13 The consensus among them is that it is more likely
that, at the least, the Internet is not quite doubling every year, and at most it is
doubling every six months.
11 Andrew Odlyzko, “Internet Growth: Myth and Reality, Use and Abuse,” Information
Impacts Magazine, Nov. 2000.
See [http://www.cisp.org/imp/november_2000/odlyzko/11_00odlyzko.htm].
12 Karen Hold, “Perception Is Reality,” Broadband World, Aug. 2001.
13 Ibid.

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Number of Web Sites and Web Pages
Web Characterization Project (OCLC). Researchers at the Online
Computer Library Center (OCLC), a nonprofit membership organization serving
libraries worldwide, are conducting a study to determine the structure, size, usage,
and content of the Web. The Web Characterization Project conducts an annual Web
sample to analyze trends in the size and content of the Web. In 2002, the study found
that there were 9,040,000 Web sites worldwide. (A “Web site” is defined as “a
distinct location on the Internet identified by an IP address, which returns a response
code of 200 and a Web page in response to an HTTP request for the root page. The
Web site consists of all interlinked Web pages residing at the IP address.”) OCLC
says that these Web sites represent 36% of the Web as a whole. Overall, there are
8,712,000 unique Web sites worldwide, a number that consists of public sites,
duplicates of these sites, sites offering content for a restricted audience, and sites that
are “under construction.”14
In the last five years, OCLC researchers calculate that the public Web has more
than doubled in size, increasing from 1,457,000 sites in 1998 to just over 3 million
in 2002. Public Web sites provide free, unrestricted access to all or at least a
significant portion of their content. According to the results of the Web
Characterization Project’s most recent survey, the public Web, as of June 2002,
contained 3,080,000 public Web sites, or 35% of the Web as a whole. The public
sites identified by the Project accounted for approximately 1.4 billion Web pages.15
Between 1998 and 1999, the public Web expanded by more than 50%; between
2000 and 2001, the growth rate had dropped to only 6%, and between 2001 and 2002,
the public Web actually shrank slightly in size. Most of the growth in the public Web
observed during the five years covered by the surveys occurred in the first three years
of the survey (1998-2000). In 1998, the public Web was a little less than half its size
in 2002; by 2000, however, it was about 96% of its size in 2002. Estimates from the
Web Characterization Project’s June 2002 data suggest that while the public Web,
in terms of number of sites, is getting smaller, public Web sites themselves are
getting larger. In 2001, the average number of pages per public site was 413; in
2002, that number had increased to 441.16
In addition to a slower rate of new site creation, the rate at which existing sites
disappear may have increased. Analysis of the 2001 and 2002 Web sample data
suggests that as much as 17% of public Web sites that existed in 2001 had ceased to
exist by 2002.17
14 “Web Characterization” (click on “statistics” tab), OCLC Online Computer Library
Center, Inc., Office of Research. See [http://wcp.oclc.org/].
15 “Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web: 1998-2002,” D-Lib Magazine, April 2003.
See [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/lavoie/04lavoie.html].
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.

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In 1999, the second year of the Web Characterization Project survey, the public
Web sites identified in the sample were traced back to entities — individuals,
organizations, or business concerns — located in 76 different countries, suggesting
that the Web’s content at that time was fairly global. A closer examination of the
data, however, belies this conclusion. In fact, approximately half of all public Web
sites were associated with entities located in the United States. No other country
accounted for more than 5% of public Web sites, and only eight countries, apart from
the United States, accounted for more than 1%. Clearly, in 1999, the Web was a
U.S.-centric information space. Three years later, little had changed. The proportion
of public Web sites originating from U.S. sources actually increased slightly in 2002,
to 55%, while the proportions accounted for by the other leading countries remained
roughly the same. In 2002, as in 1999, the sample contained public sites originating
from a total of 76 countries. These results suggest that the Web is not exhibiting any
discernable trend toward greater internationalization.18
Pornography on the Internet has received a lot of attention. The Web
Characterization Project’s 2002 survey indicates that adult sites—those offering
sexually explicit content — constitute approximately 3% of the public Web, or a little
more than 100,000 sites.19
Alexa Internet Web Crawl. Alexa Internet (formerly Alexa Research), a
public company now partnered with the Google search engine, was founded in 1996
to analyze multiterabyte collections of data which provide Web traffic statistics and
links to the best sites on the Web. Alexa Internet continually crawls all publicly
available Web sites to create a series of snapshots of the Web. As a service to future
historians, scholars, and other interested parties, Alexa Internet donates a copy of
each crawl of the Web to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization committed
to the long-term preservation and maintenance of a growing collection of data about
the Web. In March 2001, Alexa Research estimated that there were 4 billion publicly
accessible Web pages. Every two months, Alexa “crawls” or surveys the entire Web
and counts the number of unique top-level pages. Whatever page shows up at
“www.example.com” is considered a top-level page. Alexa then counts these pages,
removing duplicates for an estimate of total unique Web pages.20
The number of Web hosts (computers with Web servers that serve pages for one
or more Web sites) keeps on growing, according to Alexa Internet’s archiving
project. 21 In May 1999, Alexa counted 2.5 million hosts. In September 1999, the
18 Ibid.
19 “OCLC Researchers Track Five-Year Growth of Public Web,” OCLC press release, Dec.
18, 2002. See: [http://wcp.oclc.org/] (click on “Office of Research” tab, then in the “Areas
of Interest” box, click on “Web Characterization Project”).
20 “The Internet Archive: Building an ‘Internet Library,’” Internet Archive, Mar. 10, 2001,
at [http://www.archive.org/]. See also “Frequently Asked Questions” at
[http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php].
21 “Alexa Technology: How and Why We Crawl the Web.”
See [http://pages.alexa.com/company/technology.html?p=Corp_W_t_40_L1]

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number had risen to 3.4 million. Alexa’s crawl is updated every two months and, as
of October 2002, contained 2.5 billion unique URLs and 2 billion unique html pages.
The Internet Archive. The Internet Archive, working with Alexa Internet and
the Library of Congress, created the Wayback Machine, unveiled on October 24,
2001. The Wayback Machine is a new digital library tool which goes “way back” in
Internet time to locate archived versions of over 10 billion Web pages dating to
1996.22 Although the project attempts to archive the entire publicly available Web,
some sites may not be included because they are password-protected or otherwise
inaccessible to automated software “crawlers” (programs that visit Web sites and
read their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine
index. The major search engines on the Web all have such programs, which are also
called “spiders” or “bots”). Sites which don’t want their Web pages included in the
archive can put a robots.txt file on their site and crawlers will mark all previously
archived pages as inaccessible. The archive has been crawling faster over the years,
and technology is getting cheaper over time, but the project is still very much a work
in progress.23
Other Research Reports. In May 2000, researchers at IBM, Compaq, and
AltaVista completed the first comprehensive “map” of the World Wide Web. The
study developed a “bow tie” theory which explained the dynamic behavior of the
Web and yielded insights into the Web’s complex organization. The researchers
uncovered divisive boundaries between regions of the Internet which argued against
the widely held impression that the entire Internet is highly connected.24 The study
looked at roughly 200 million Web pages and the 5 billion links to and from each
page. On the basis of their analysis, the researchers set out a “bow tie theory” of Web
structure, in which the World Wide Web is fundamentally divided into four large
regions, each containing approximately the same number of pages.
The researchers found that four distinct regions make up approximately 90% of
the Web (the bow tie), with approximately 10% of the Web completely disconnected
from the entire bow tie. The “strongly-connected core” (the knot of the bow tie)
contains about one-third of all Web sites. These include portal sites like Yahoo, large
corporate sites like Microsoft, and popular news and entertainment destinations.
Web surfers can easily travel between these sites via hyperlinks; consequently, this
large “connected core” is at the heart of the Web.
One side of the bow contains “origination” pages, constituting almost
one-quarter of the Web. Origination pages are pages that allow users to eventually
reach the connected core, but that cannot be reached from it. The other side of the
22 Kendra Mayfield, “Wayback Goes Way Back on Web,” Wired News, Oct. 29, 2001.
See [http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,47894,00.html].
23 “Wayback Machine,” Internet Archive. See [http://www.archive.org/index.php].
24 Altavista, Compaq, and IBM Researchers Create World’s Largest, Most Accurate Picture
of the Web. IBM Research Almaden News press release, May 11, 2000.
See [http://www.almaden.ibm.com/almaden/webmap_release.html]. Graph Structure in the
Web. AltaVista Company, IBM Almaden Research Center, Compaq Systems Research
Center. See [http://research.compaq.com/news/map/www9%20paper.htm].

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bow contains “termination” pages, constituting approximately one-fourth of the Web.
Termination pages can be accessed from the connected core, but do not link back to
it. The fourth and final region contains “disconnected” pages, constituting
approximately one-fifth of the Web. Disconnected pages can be connected to
origination or termination pages but do not provide access to or from the connected
core.
This surprising pattern became apparent almost immediately. “About half the
time, we’d follow all the links from a page and the whole thing would peter out fairly
quickly,” according to Andrew Tomkins, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research
Center. “The other half of the time, the list of links would grow and grow and
eventually we’d find 100 million other pages — half of the whole universe.”25
In January 2000, researchers at NEC Research Institute and Inktomi completed
a study that estimated that the Web has more than one billion unique pages.26
Interestingly, although Inktomi “crawled” more than a billion pages on the Web,
Inktomi’s chief scientist commented at a search engine conference that “[i]t was
difficult to find 500 million legitimate pages after culling duplicates and spam. We
found 445 million, but had to go digging to get the index to 500 million.”27 A
number of facts emerged from the study:
Number of documents in Inktomi database: over one billion
Number of servers discovered: 6,409,521
Number of mirrors (identical Web sites) in servers discovered: 1,457,946
Number of sites (total servers minus mirrors): 4,951,247
Number of good sites (reachable over 10-day period): 4,217,324
Number of bad sites (unreachable): 733,923
Top level domains: .com - 54.68%; .net -7.82%; .org - 4.35%; .gov - 1.15%;
.mil - 0.17%
Percentage of documents in English: 86.55%
Percentage of documents in French: 2.36%
Invisible Web
In addition, it is necessary to account for the “invisible Web” (databases within
Web sites). According to an August 2000 study by BrightPlanet, an Internet content
company which provides research, Internet audience measurement products and
services, the World Wide Web is 400 to 550 times bigger than previously
estimated.28 In 2000, AltaVista estimated the size of the Web at about 350 million
25 “Study Reveals Web as Loosely Woven,” New York Times, May 18, 2000.
See [http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/circuits/articles/18webb.html].
26 “Web Surpasses One Billion Documents,” Inktomi press release, Jan. 18, 2000.
27 Chris Sherman, “‘Old Economy’ Info Retrieval Clashes with ‘New Economy’ Web
Upstarts at the Fifth Annual Search Engine Conference,” Information Today, Apr.24, 2000.
See [http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb000424-2.htm].
28 “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value,” Bright Planet, July 2000. See
(continued...)

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pages; Inktomi put it at about 500 million pages. According to the BrightPlanet
study, the Web consists of hundreds of billions of documents hidden in searchable
databases unretrievable by conventional search engines — what it refers to as the
“deep Web.” The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information, compared to
19 terabytes of information on the surface Web. A single terabyte of storage could
hold each of the following: 300 million pages of text, 100,000 medical x-rays, or 250
movies.29
Search engines rely on technology that generally identifies “static” pages, rather
than the “dynamic” information stored in databases. When a Web page is requested,
the server where the page is stored returns the HTML document to the user’s
computer. On a static Web page, this is all that happens. The user may interact with
the document through clicking available links, or a small program (an applet) may
be activated, but the document has no capacity to return information that is not
pre-formatted. On a dynamic Web page, the user searches (often through a form) for
data contained in a database on the server that will be assembled on the fly according
to what is requested.
Deep Web content resides in searchable databases, from which results can only
be discovered by a direct query. Without the directed query, the database does not
publish the result. Thus, while the content is there, it is skipped over by traditional
search engines which cannot probe beneath the surface. Some examples of Web sites
with “dynamic” searchable databases are THOMAS (legislative information),
PubMed and MEDLINE (medical information), SEC corporate filings, yellow pages,
classified ads, shopping/auction sites, and library catalogs.
Conclusion
In summary, it is difficult to precisely quantify the growth rate of the Internet.
Different research methods measure different growth factors: search engines measure
the number of pages their crawlers can index, the Internet Domain survey attempts
to count every host on the Internet, and computer scientists survey Web sites to locate
both publicly-available Web content and “invisible” databases. It is important to
understand what is being measured and when it was measured. Many of these
surveys do not overlap and their results cannot be compared. They provide useful
snapshots of Internet size or growth at a particular time, but one shouldn’t assign
more significance to them than is warranted.
28 (...continued)
[http://www.completeplanet.com/help/help_deepwebFAQs.asp].
29 “The Life Cycle of Government Information: Challenges of Electronic Innovation,” 1995
FLICC Forum on Federal Information Policies, Library of Congress, Mar.24, 1995. See
[http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc/forum95.html].

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Selected Web Addresses for Internet Statistics
General demographic information
[http://www.nua.ie/surveys/]
Nua Internet Surveys—How Many Online
[http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html]
Internet Domain Survey (Network Wizards)
[http://www.isc.org/ds]
Internet Facts and Stats (Cisco Systems)
[http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/govtaffs/factsNStats/index.html]