The web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom. Till October, the Web grew by more than 17.5 million sites, says monitoring firm Netcraft. This figure exceeds the growth of 16 million sites seen in 2000 when the Internet frenzy was at its most feverish pitch.
But there are differences. Unlike the growth of 2000 which had been fuelled by big companies and big investors, the rise this time has been caused by small businesses going online, firms making the most of web advertising schemes and spammers.
In its October 2005 survey, Netcraft found 74,409,971 web addresses, an increase of more than 2.68 million from the September figure. This jump of just under three million took the total growth in sites for 2005 past the previous record of 16 million seen five years ago.
It means there are now almost 75 million websites worldwide. Many of these will include domains that have been registered but not used, meaning they only have a basic holding page. The stats may also struggle to accurately count instances where multiple sites use the same Web address. Despite these drawbacks, Netcraft's figures, which have been published quarterly since 1995, are still a handy guide to the development of the Web. Netcraft's monthly survey completed 10 years in August 2005. The first survey it ran, the year Amazon launched, found only 18,957 sites. Five years later the figure was 19.8 million.
Although October brought yet another peak in the number of responses received, the top-four players, Apache, Microsoft (which includes Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, and Microsoft-PWS), Sun (which includes SunONE, iPlanet-Enterprise, Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce, and Netsite-Communications), and Zeus essentially remained flat.
Collectively, they account for 92.92 percent of all sites counted with Apache accounting for 69.15 per cent of all servers. Of the sites surveyed, 39,171,171, or 50.91 percent, had .com domains; 41,74,673, or about 5.43 percent, had .uk domains.
Netcraft believes that this boom in websites is partly driven by more small businesses getting online. Blogging has also played a part. Many blogs are hosted within a single domain and thus not counted as separate sites, while others are hosted on separate servers. But the boom is not purely attributed to positive forces.
Rich Miller, an analyst with Netcraft, told BBC that a site is essentially a newly registered domain or net address. However, this count is complicated by the fact that the Web allows many different sites, sometimes thousands, to hang off the same net address. To make matters slightly more complicated, many registrars who sell Net names use unsold domains as holding pages to attract new trade. These pages may never be updated but do have a small amount of web content on them.
As a result there can be a big difference between the total count of sites and so-called "active sites" that are regularly updated. In the past it has been estimated that up to 60 per cent of all the sites counted by Netcraft were not actively updated. Despite this, Miller believes that much of the recent growth is genuine and marks the appearance of proper, active sites.
Blogging has also contributed to the Web growth. Some blogging sites host the individual blogs on their own domain but many bloggers have taken the step of setting up their own site and installing opensource blogging softwares. Another reason being seen is the trend of many registrars making better use of unused domains by using them to exploit the advertising systems operated by Google and Yahoo. There also been a growth in firms which buy domains that are no longer in use but still have significant web traffic associated with them. These are again used to harness web advertising schemes.
Spammers can be found here too. Many spammers set up dummy domains to push their products to the top of search rankings. Many spammers run sophisticated operations that automated website creation to push products. One of the driving forces behind this is the craze for Google Page Ranks. Google ranks pages of websites, not acording to the quality of content, but on basis of poppularity i.e. depending on how many sites link up to a page. A group of fake sites are used to rocket the rankings of the main Website.
