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How many websites are there?

2004-03-08: how many websites exist? There is no exact answer to this question. For one thing, a good definition of a website is hard to pin down; a reasonable definition might be "a fully qualified domain name, such as www.example.com, which delivers unique or mostly unique content." This rules out, for instance, alternate names for the same site that always fetch exactly the same pages.

As of this writing, Google states that they are indexing 4,285,199,774 distinct web pages. But not every page is indexed by the Google search engine, and websites are made up of multiple pages.

Large websites can have many thousands of pages. Dynamically generated sites can have a seemingly infinite number -- but Google is smart enough to stop short of analyzing the same site forever. Yet most sites just have a few pages introducing a business or a person, or simply a placeholder home page. My personal experience, coupled with rumors of a survey finding that 35 million distinct top level domains existed in December, 2003, leads me to suggest that an average site has roughly 100 unique pages. Dividing Google's figure of 4.28 billion by 100 gives us roughly 43 million sites. But this figure is only a very crude estimate. The web is growing all the time, no one is in charge, and by the time you've counted a tiny fraction of it, many sites have come and gone. stripe-whores

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