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2005 Looks Like Record Year for Net Growth
miller60 writes "Netcraft reports that the Internet grew by 2.7 million sites in June, the second-largest gain in the history of its Web Server Survey. With growth of 10 million sites in the first half of the year, 2005 should easily surpass the existing annual growth record of 16 million sites from the dot-com boom year of 2000. The growth of small business web sites, blogs, domain name businesses and online advertising are all cited as factors in the strong gains."
The average site, of the 2.7m:
eN14Rg3 y0Ur m4N1Lh0oD! or|)3r v!46Ra 70|)4Y!
Just the other day we were being told that the Internet was broken and needed replacing. Then, we find that it is growing very nicely, only to have this article confirm it...
I mean, is this where I toot my own horn and say: I told you so!!?!?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Its interesting that the percentage of Microsoft powered servers has risen 0.27 from the last statistics, perhaps suggesting that improvements to the latest versions of IIS are increasing use. As for the overall growth, the use of blogs as a commercial tool seems to really be coming into age and this may prove interesting as to filtering and blocking spam or excessively promotional blogs from search engines and feed spiders.
Business Voyeur
It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.
How many of those sites are just link farms used to pollute search engines like Google? I'm noticing more and more of these linkfarms getting high placement when searching for things. It's making searching frustrating.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
The porn industry has grown by 2.5 million websites in the past year...
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
or maybe just that joke. If not, kill it anyway.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Anyone seen a good new site in '05?
__
Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
With China's rapid pace of catching up, I'm guessing that the proportion to new sites in China as opposed to other countries is significantly higher.
This leads me to wonder: Is Linux/BSD part of the reason for the continuing rapid growth of the Internet?
The cost of alternatives like Windows Server is incredibly expensive, at least for smaller companies and individuals.
With the free availability of commercial strength operating systems like Linux and BSD, almost any small company or individual can have a solid presence on the Internet. Not to mention, web hosting providers can keep costs way down by using Linux/BSD.
This is truly an exciting time to live!
How many of them got slashdotted?
It may be a record year for net growth, but what about gross growth?
...how many of those are geocities?
There is one glaring omission in your list: the GNU project. In fact, the net should really be called GNU/Internet.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out "Look what I had for breakfast this morning"
It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.
So true. Judging by all the throw-away domain names I see in spam everyday (e.g., fqydahwviagra.scam), I wonder what percentage of the domains are real. I also wonder if some of the domain name expansion is just companies protecting themselves with alternate tradename spellings and TLDs
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Over here at http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200506/ index.html, it shows Apache simply increased its market share in the month heading up to July 2005. This reminds me of what statistics can be: They can be made/manipulated into anything the presenter wants to project. So who is telling lies here? SecuritySpace or Netcraft or both?
...question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
How many of these sites are sites like slashdot.net, whom use domains for useless purposes to sell advertising and wait for someone to pay a large sum of money just to have the domain used for a useful purpose. There should be a top level domain that does not allow registering of sites that provide little purpose.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
It's pretty steady on the first graph; about a 2.1:1 ratio of hostnames to "active" (sites, servers?). I suspect this goes beyond simply registering foo.org and foo.com while only running foo.com. Any suggestions?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I think the best days of the web are behind us.
When the internet first hit, almost all websites were free. If Joe wanted to tell the world about his love of aviation, he set up a website. People put in lots of hours, with quality information.
But how has the internet evolved?
Money currupted the internet.
For example, try typing in "learn spanish" in google. How many websites are places that want your money? When the internet first started, there were better websites that were free. Not anymore, they got pushed off the web.
I think the web has outlived its usefullness. It is like TV. Too many commercials. I wonder if the next computer will come with a machine to suck in dollar bills. Maybe it can transmit the numbers off a $10 bill and shred it, so that way the bank credits the other end.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
A greater number say: This site under construction.
I would rather have 1 quality website than get 10 new bad websites and lose that quality website.
I'll give one more example. Even if you like porn, say you want to find MILF's. So you type in MILF in google, and you get 1 real MILF website for every 20 websites that just refeer you to the original website.
Maybe the solution is a better search engine. One that is not based on money, so nobody can buy a better result. A search engine that rejects refferal websites and spam.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
How does Netcraft define the word "site"? If it just means domains that resolve to a host, it's not very encouraging. I would like to see a breakdown of the numbers that shows how many of these sites are linkspam farms, redirects and other such junk.
My suspicion is that most of the growth comes from from such "sites". The survey notes read:
While individuals may use ad revenues to subsidize the cost of parking domains while they develop them, the new business model for advertising-filled parked domains and spam-filled "commercial weblogs" means that the amount of junk on the net will increase.
This also means that it's now even more lucrative for domain squatters to hold onto decent domains, which will increase their resources and abilities to register and squat on an even greater number of domains. After all, this is now an acceptable and viable business model that works against those who want to contribute something useful to the Internet. Squatters can now cite ad-revenue squats in arbitration cases.
This isn't a positive development.
Google only lets you see the first 1000 URLs matching your query, and many of them are irrelevent, useless, or charging a fee. It is sometimes hard to find reliable, relevent information.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
"Google only lets you see the first 1000 URLs matching your query, and many of them are irrelevent, useless, or charging a fee. It is sometimes hard to find reliable, relevent information."
Oh yeah that last one must be killing the "reliable, relevent" market.
Maybe thats why we're starting to get flooded with domains like .tv, .info, .biz, .lollercoaster, etc
Problem with IPv4 was running out of IPs, but they must be running out of domain names too?
Also, something should be done about the damn placeholder sites waiting to be bought, with no other purpose. You should not be allowed to have a domain name unless you're going have a REAL SITE there. A good example is the damn "search engines" which you get on as soon as you make a typo in a URL. Another example is netidentity.com.. on the bottom of their sites they say "We've reserved over 17,000 name-based domains to share with you. Get an e-mail or web address in your name -- it's easy"
What a waste of valuable domain names this is.
The economic growth is what matters, and before the end of this year the whole damn thing going to collapse no matter how you look at it. For a technical community, there is almost a arrogance on slashdot that shuns economic science, and I think that people will pay a bitter price within the next year if they don't loose that attitude.
Nowadays, Joe Aviation-lover probably contributes to aviation articles on Wikipedia.
"When the Internet first hit", people created lots of disparate Web sites all over the place, with little bits of information spread all over. It was hard finding and piecing together all this information if you needed to know more about something, because there would be a hundred different websites on a topic, by a hundred different people, all thin on info. Wikipedia was a stroke of genius - they got those hundred people together to instead create one single, central, quality resource on that topic. Now those hundred little websites that used to exist are made redundant - Wikipedia supercedes all of them - so in a sense we don't really need to mourn their loss. Of course it's more impersonal, but blogs have largely replaced "the personal web site" as a mechanism for expressing yourself, and despite all the cynical comments on slashdot, blogs are popular and do serve a purpose (of course Sturgeon's law applies, but it always did before to "personal web sites" too).
The Web hasn't outlived it's usefulness at all - it's just changed. In fact, with sites like Wikipedia, I'd say it's more useful than ever before - I consult Wikipedia all the time, it's got an incredible wealth of quality information in it, and growing rapidly.
(Yeah I probably sound like a Wikipedia shill or something.)
The Huffington Post - a collection of opinionated high-profile bloggers who are already making waves by making the notion of blogs accessible to people outside the "blogosphere"
Bayosphere - citizen journalism in the San Francisco bay area, and noted tech journalist Dan Gillmor's new hangout
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"If you want a search engine that is not based on money, then how will its continued operation be funded?"
MAGIC!
Just because the world wide web is growing faster than before, doesn't nessicarily mean that the Internet is healthy.
I would still argue that, while yes, the web is growing and a lot of good is happening on the Internet, it is still fatally flawed as evident in email, search engine, and blog spam. Putting it simply, the Internet is flawed because there isn't a structure in place for it to pay for itself without annoying advertisements. Google's made a lot of headway in this department, but even they're getting sued because they can't prevent scammers from ruining their attempts.
The Internet is broken, even if the world wide web is growing and working fine. More specifically, POP, IMAP, SMTP protocols are mortally broken, even if they work as built. Replacing the hardware underneath may help, but honestly, I think it's mainly the software's fault its in such bad shape.
Just remember, the World Wide Web is the most prevalent service running on the Internet. The Internet is much, much more than that though!
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
That is what I would like to know: How many new people (w/valid credit card) get connected to the Internet every day? It is nice with Netcraft information on how much the competition is increasing every day, but what would be more fun to know is how many New Pepole get on the net daily? Does anyone know?
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
A website which is static over time is no fun and will not gain a wide audience. That is why all websites generally are in a state of permanent construction. Putting those stupid under construction pictures on sites is just tragic, they should be banned from the Internet immediately.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I like the way you think.
.xxx)
What we need is a new TLD, and have all the Spammers get their domains under it. It's easy to block, it's easy for parents to protect their kids from V!a-G-i-kra.
(FYI: This was the same argument for
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Come on. It's funny.
Isn't this bordering on the illegal? Theres no way im paying $1000 to register my name, its absolutely rediculous, and they advertise that they have over 475,000 'quality' domain names. Good lord...
does that include zombies?
I rememeber the days when lycos was the search site. Then it started returning garbage with the first big wave of net commercialization (damn you, Bob Davis!).
Then I found this little search site with an odd name just a demo on a stanford.edu webserver when I first found it, that returned much more relevant results.
But then yahoo search results started getting overwhelmed with garbage, and I turned to another little project out of stanford. And that one has a good run, staying ahead of the garbage pretty well until the last year or so.
But now Google's a victim of it's own success, entire industries are devoted to hacking it's search algos, meanwhile (like yahoo before it) it's pouring it's development $ in directions other than it's original core 'killrapp'.
And now we desperately need a newer, better, search engine, but I think maybe not a new web...
Oh No! Netcraft confirmed that BSD is dying!
With sites like rotten.com do you refer to the web growing as "Net" growth or "Gross" growth?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
the whole damn thing going to collapse
"the whole damn thing is going to collapse"
almost a arrogance
"an".
if they don't loose that attitude
"lose".
Why do they continue to plot the NCSA server share when it flatlined 5 years ago?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I think what the parent was referring to is domain names that are just sat on in case anyone wants to buy it.
I recently went domain name hunting and found many good names I wanted to use, but they were all being used by blank pages. Pages that say "under construction" and that's it. And that's all that ever will be until someone buys them from the owner.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Any entity (person, corporation, or partnership) should be able to get one domain name cheaply. After that, ICANN should impose a charge of about $250 per year, to kill off those "link farm" operations.