Web growth
From: Lavoie,Brian (lavoie@oclc.org)
Date: Wed, Mar 17 1999
Message-ID: <72B89459DD2BD211B5CD0000F840094E107548@oa3-server.dev.oclc.org>
From: "Lavoie,Brian" <lavoie@oclc.org>
To: "'www-wca@w3.org'" <www-wca@w3.org>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:48:39 -0500
Subject: Web growth
Ed and I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations in regard to the growth
numbers Jim posted:
We fitted three different trendlines (power, linear, and exponential)
through the three data points from Compaq SRC for the number of Web pages.
Interestingly, the R-squared for each was about the same, although the
exponential had the best fit (use 120 as the scalar, 0.0829 as the growth
rate, in terms of months). Using the exponential trend and extrapolating to
Mar. 99 suggests there are about 743 million Web pages currently. Is this
figure plausible? Well, in July 1998, Vinton Cerf estimated there were about
350 million pages, so given the above extrapolation, in 8 months the number
of Web pages would have doubled, which is pretty close to the doubling rate
Jim estimated. So there may in fact be about three-quarters of a billion Web
pages out there now.
Brian Lavoie
OCLC