Web reaches one trillion milestone

We all the know the web is big, but exactly how expansive is it?

Calculations by engineers at Google show that there are now one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the net.

Google first started indexing the web in 1998 and by that stage there were already 26 million pages.

By 2000, the number had hit the one billion mark, and just last week the one trillion milestone was surpassed.

Google is able to calculate how many pages are on the net by counting links. Even allowing for duplicate links, the company found one trillion unique URLs or website addresses.

The number of pages is growing by several billion a day, according to engineers writing the in the Google blog.

However, even Google doesn't know precisely how many web pages there are.

"We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite," the Web Search Infrastructure Team at Google wrote.

www.googleblog.blogspot.com