Initially, my intended question was: How big is the Internet? This question provoked curiosity, curiosity led to research and research revealed two facts:
- The Internet is a distributed body and no complete index of it exists.
- In what terms do I want to measure the size of the Internet? - The population online? The number of indexed websites? The distinct servers on the Internet? The traffic running per second? And, the list of similar questions proved to be a long one.
Consequently, I had to narrow down my first question. I had to come up with a single metric that would quench the exact curiosity. This is how I came up with the title of this post: How Big is the Population of the Internet?
In other words, how many users are there online?
First, let's take a little excursion. Let's imagine the Internet back before Mr. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (before 1989). Or, preferably, let's imagine this Internet after the WWW was created but before it was released by CERN to the public (before 1991). Are you getting the picture? Back then you had to use the SMTP - Simple Mail Transport Protocol, separately to send an e-mail, and chances were, you had to know it.
So, how many users do you think were there online?
We might take a different approach and look at plain facts and existing statistics.
A fact - the World Wide Web ( a system of Internet servers that supports hypertext to access several Internet Protocols, IPs, on a single interface), was one of the developments that fueled the growth of the Internet.
Statistics - The number of websites passed 1 million in 1997; over 20 billion web pages were indexed on over 20 million websites in 2002; and, the widespread use of Blogs, RSS and podcast arose in 2006.
May I ask you one last question? What is the rough estimate you have in mind right now about the population on the Internet? Millions? Billions? - another statistic is that the Internet population passed 1 billion in 2008, just to give you a clue.
So, what's the point? The answer is, Enormous Internet Growth! I bet that there is a measurable difference between when I'm typing this and when you are reading it.
When I embarked on this, finding the population online, I thought that getting the exact figures would be one hell of a research. But, information online is always just a click away. All I had to do was just type a query, visit a few sites and finally, compile the stats I have linked to below
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