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In the course of indexing the Web, the WebCrawler collects data that is useful in analyzing the overall size of the Web. While these statistics do not reflect the exact size of the Web, their relative values provide an interesting picture of how the Web has grown.
Let's start with the breakdown of servers by the type of protocol they speak. The vast majority of servers on the Web are HTTP servers, with FTP and Gopher also present in significant numbers. The following graph shows the breakdown of servers by protocol; those in the other category include telnet, rlogin, tn3270 and wais.
The Web's size has increased eightfold during the last year, with most of the growth coming from new HTTP servers. The graph below shows the number of World-Wide Web (HTTP) servers that the WebCrawler has visited over time. These numbers reflect only servers with actual working IP addresses, and do not account for the larger number of logically distinct sites that often coexist on a single host.
If you would like to include this figures in a report, please reference the WebCrawler as the source. The raw data behind these charts are also available.
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