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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."
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.
Bluntly, ``growing'' does not mean ``not broken or in need of replacement.'' Cancer grows a lot, too, you know. Want to take a guess at how many of those sites are made by spammers and phishers?
There is one glaring omission in your list: the GNU project. In fact, the net should really be called GNU/Internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)