Web Not Growing As Fast As It Used To

The OCLC released the results of its annual World Wide Web survey last week, and while the Web is still growing it's not growing as fast.

According to OCLC research, the public web (that is, "a distinct location on the Internet offering unrestricted public access to content via web protocols") consisted of more than 3.1 million sites, an increase of 6 percent over last year's total.

These sites constitute 36% of the entire Web. The rest of the sites -- and the entire Web totals nearly 9 million sites according to OCLC -- are duplicates of other public sites, sites that offer contact for a restricted audience, or "under construction sites."

About half of the sites sampled in the 2001 survey were provided by organizations or persons located in the US, 5 percent by German organizations, and 4 percent each by Canadian and Japanese organizations. About 75 percent of all public sites in 2001 contained some content in English.

The OCLC noted that about 16 percent of the organizations providing content on public sites are associated with information industries, including ISPs, commercial publishers, and software companies. Retailers made up about 12 percent of the organizations. You can get more information about the study, including past statistics, at http://wcp.oclc.org/ .

Posted to Internet-Web-Statistics