Estimating The Total Number Of Web Pages

There's no real way to know how many pages are on the World Wide Web, as pages get created and deleted every second of every day. The closest we can come to estimating the size is to see what numbers the search engines are reporting.

Recently, Google announced that it had a trillion unique web pages in its index, so let's use that as our base number (1,000,000,000,000). They didn't give a date as to when that happened, so we'll arbitrarily say it happened at midnight on July 15th, 2008.

Google also stated that several billion (1,000,000,000) pages are added to the index each day. Throw out duplicate pages and factor in deleted pages and let's say for the sake of argument that the index grows by only 1 billion unique pages per day. This amounts to (if you round it up) about 12,000 pages per second.

Using these two facts, then, we can estimate the current size of the Web as consisting of 1,366,955,092,000 unique Web pages.

Even if we're way off (and we're probably underestimating the total), that's a lot of pages.