Media News - Tuesday, September 13, 2011

How many pages are on the internet?

A group called the World Wide Web Foundation is on a quest to figure out, with some degree certainty, how big the internet really is. With a USD 1m grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, said the foundation's CEO, Steve Bratt. "The Web Index will be the world's first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed and developing countries, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries." Bratt stressed that it won't answer every question people have about the internet, but he hopes the index, which will be presented as a series of annual reports, will go a long way toward filling in some of the gaps. Bratt said the Web Foundation will conduct surveys of internet users, interview relevant people and try to gather data from internet service providers, national governments and search engines such as Google to come up with its findings. In addition to looking at how big the Web is, the group wants to use data to tease out the role social media sites had in sparking revolution in the Middle East this year. And it wants to find out what kinds of websites people all over the world are looking at; what websites exist; and how internet trends differ from country to country and region to region. (CNN)

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