Have you ever wondered, “How big is the internet?” Well, according to the New York Daily News , the internet now contains a whopping one billion websites . This figure comes from Internet Live Stats, a real-time monitor that tracks the number of websites on the internet. As of the afternoon of Wednesday, September 17, the internet contains exactly 1,061,340,968 websites, though the number is quickly growing by leaps and bounds.
Furthermore, it turns out that it was the internet’s original founder, Tim Berners-Lee, who originally touted this amazing milestone.
http://t.co/D9pwMXuZOa recently passed a billion websites by their count….
— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) September 16, 2014
The World Wide Web Consortium reveals that Berners-Lee “ wrote the first web client and server in 1990? using “specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML.” These days, he serves as Director for the World Wide Web Foundation, which seeks to “further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.” According to The Register , Berners-Lee also champions against websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster, i.e., websites that he believes are taking the Web away from being a “ universal information space .”
Regardless, the World Wide Web just turned 25 this past April. It’s considered to be 25-years-old versus 24-years-old (2014 – 1990 = 24) because, according to Google’s official blog, it was on March 12, 1989, that Berners-Lee initially submitted the proposal for what we now consider to be the internet.
Tech Times notes that, these days, “around 40 percent of the world’s population” has access to the internet , and thus access to Berners-Lee’s creation. And anyone with access to both therefore possesses the capability to build his or her own website, be it a blog, a store, or whatever. It should come as no surprise that many people take advantage of this power, and for good reasons: to start businesses, to share information, to connect with others, etc.
What’s scary is that, according to Business Insider , the internet reportedly contained only about 644 million websites back in March 2010, meaning it grew by a whopping 55 percent within the span of just two years. Keep in mind that 75 percent of the one billion websites currently in existence are parked domains. These domains are typically used to direct a user elsewhere. For instance, if you were to direct your browser to the parked domain gogle.com, you would immediately be redirected to google.com.
Anyway, given how many websites popped up within the past two years, there’s no telling how many websites will exist in two more years, let alone 20 more years!
[Image via Google Images ]