The growth of the World Wide Web has been phenomenal. Nearly 1.5 billion people around the world use the Internet.

As of June 2008, there were over 63 billion pages in the publicly-indexed Web. Google Search has discovered one trillion unique URLs. Most Web pages are in English (56.4%). The next most common languages are German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%).

The growth in the total number of unique Web sites is as follows:

  • 1991: 1 (The first web site was published August 6, 1991)
  • 1992: 50
  • 1993: 150
  • 1994: 3,000
  • 1995: 25,000
  • 1996: 250,000
  • 1997: 1.2 million
  • 1998: 2.6 million
  • 1999: 4.7 million
  • 2000: 7.1 million
  • 2001: 30 million
  • 2002: 37 million
  • 2003: 47 million
  • 2004: 54 million
  • 2005: 73 million
  • 2006: 100 million
  • 2007: 155 million
  • 2008: 182 million (as of September)

 

There are many ways to count Web sites. Other measures show only about 100 million sites. There are 550 million unique IP addresses assigned a name.

Sources: Internet World Stats, Netcraft, Internet Systems Consortium, Domain Tools, and ReligiousTolerance.org


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