Just how big is the web? Ask Google

The growth rate of the internet is accelerating, so much so that a rather astounding web-related milestone was recently passed; Google’s webpage index logged its one trillionth URL.

The growth rate of the internet is accelerating, so much so that a rather astounding web-related milestone was recently passed; Google’s webpage index logged its one trillionth URL.

According to The Official Google Blog, back when it first sent its bots forth to map the web in 1998, the resulting index contained 26 million pages. By the year 2000 that number had shot up to one billion. And eight years later more than one trillion – that’s 1000 billion – individual pages are now indexed.

Of course, there must actually be many more than one trillion pages on the web, since Google doesn’t claim to have found them all. And Google’s count takes out all the duplicate pages or URLs that auto-generate copies of each other, so if you take them into account there’s even more.

And it is getting bigger, fast. Google says the number of individual web pages is growing at the rather impressive clip of several billion each day. Those bots better get busy.

Read more on Google bots and domain names