Re: Web growth
From: Jim Pitkow (pitkow@parc.xerox.com)
Date: Wed, Mar 17 1999
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:36:35 PST
To: "Lavoie,Brian" <lavoie@oclc.org>, "'www-wca@w3.org'" <www-wca@w3.org>
From: Jim Pitkow <pitkow@parc.xerox.com>
Message-Id: <99Mar17.123702pst."147485"@mailback.parc.xerox.com>
Subject: Re: Web growth
Yeah, that's the trouble fitting three data points. The latest I heard
from Alexa was that they've got around 200-300 million pages during their
last crawl, so 700 million seems a bit high.
At 10:48 AM 3/17/99 , Lavoie,Brian wrote:
>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
>