It's a Very Wide Web: 1 Billion Pages' Worth

It’s a Very Wide Web: 1 Billion Pages’ Worth

By ASHLEY DUNN

Jan. 20, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A new survey of the World Wide Web has turned up at least 1 billion unique Web pages, underscoring the startling growth of the Internet during the last few years.

The survey, conducted by search engine company Inktomi Corp. and the NEC Research Institute, provides one of the most accurate pictures yet of the size of the Web.

A rough estimate by the NEC Research Institute in August had placed the number of unique Web pages at about 800 million.

Foster City, Calif.-based Inktomi embarked on the survey four months ago to bolster its own search index of 110 million English-language Web pages.

Using automated programs called “spiders” that “crawled” across the Internet, marking every Web page and computer connected to the network, Inktomi was able to take a detailed snapshot of the Web.

Inktomi provides the search engine powering such Internet sites as HotBot, America Online and MSN Search. The No. 1 search site, Yahoo, also uses Inktomi’s search engine to find Web pages not listed in Yahoo’s human-edited directory.

In addition to finding 1 billion Web pages, Inktomi’s crawlers found about 6.4 million computers connected to the Internet.

More than 86% of all Web pages were in English. Two percent were in French.

The longest Web address found by Inktomi was https://www.tax.taxadvice.taxation.irs.tax representation.taxpayerhelp.internalrevenueservice.audit.taxes.com.

The most linked-to Web page on the Internet was Yahoo, with more than 750,000 other pages linking to the site.

For all the new information turned up by the survey, the end result for consumers will not be so gargantuan.

“Frankly, the size of the Web to the end user doesn’t matter that much,” Inktomi spokeswoman Julie Keslik said. “As long as they know that their search engine has selected out the best of the bunch, that’s all they care about.”

Technology and the Internet

Ashley Dunn

Ashley Dunn is the former weekend editor at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as assistant managing editor in charge of California news. Dunn joined The Times in 1986 as a suburban reporter in the San Gabriel Valley and later moved to the Metro section, where he participated in coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. After a stint at the New York Times, Dunn returned to Los Angeles in 1998 as a reporter and then editor in The Times’ Business section. He later was named to run science coverage. He worked as deputy national editor from 2007 to 2011 and played a central role in the coverage of some of the biggest national stories of recent years, including the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the 2008 election of President Obama. Prior to his career at The Times, Dunn worked at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, the Danbury News-Times in Connecticut and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Dunn is a California native who has worked as a dishwasher in Sacramento, a printer in San Francisco and a bicycle repairman in Walnut Creek. He has lived along the levees of the Sacramento Delta, the Powell-Hyde Street cable car line and the shaded streets of Pasadena. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in English.

It’s a Very Wide Web: 1 Billion Pages’ Worth

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