The World Wide Web was created as a mechanism for scientists to post text and images, and share them with colleagues. Keep that in mind the next time you visit sites with Flash navigation, embedded videos, sound clips that play when the site loads, and advertising on display.

Internet Now Serves 100 Million Websites

Netcraft tracks a variety of website-related issue. Their November 2006 survey showed the number of websites worldwide has doubled from 50 million in May 2004 to over 100 million today.



For 2006, 27.4 million websites have been added. That easily eclipsed the 17 million erected through all of 2005. Compare than to April 1997, when Netcraft recorded the one million website milestone.



"Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year," Netcraft said, "with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft." Those would include the Blogger service, which has been testing a new version, and Live Spaces, Microsoft's rebuilt blogging platform.



All of that growth looks good for a particular niche - search engines and paid search ads. Greg Sterling highlighted that point in a post at Search Engine Watch:

The bottom line here is that the more unwieldy the Internet becomes, the more central search becomes as the main navigational tool. And that means -- ka-ching -- paid search will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

While we have observed Google's growth in that revenue, we have also seen Yahoo lose ad dollars. Greater spending in paid search looks more like a zero-sum game than a tide that lifts all boats.



One could argue the point that paid search has facilitated the growth in the number of websites. People have posted sites for the sole purpose of displaying advertisements, just to grab pay per click revenue. Many of those websites scrape content from others to entice people to visit them from search engines.



There are plenty of sites that do more than just grift for cash. One would be hard-pressed to find an interest that does not have a website or two dedicated to it, not to mention plenty of people who have enjoyed learning information and meeting new friends online.



Next stop, 150 million websites.



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Tag: Internet



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