Citation
(1999), "OCLC research project measures scope of the Web", Asian Libraries, Vol. 8 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1999.17308jab.005
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 1999, MCB UP Limited
OCLC research project measures scope of the Web
OCLC research project measures scope of the Web
Researchers at OCLC have determined that the World Wide Web has approximately 3.6 million sites, of which 2.2 million are publicly accessible. They also found that the largest 25,000 sites represent about 50 per cent of the Web's content, and that the number of sites and their size are climbing. The project, conducted by the OCLC Office of Research, indicates that the World Wide Web has approximately 2.2 million Web sites that offer publicly accessible content. These sites contain nearly 300 million Web pages.
These results, obtained in June 1999 through OCLC's Web Characterisation Project, also show that significant portions of the Web are not publicly accessible or do not offer meaningful content. About 400,000 Web sites can be considered private, in that they do not offer content that is accessible without fee or prior authorisation. In addition, about 1 million sites are provisional either in a transitory or unfinished state or have only content that, from a general perspective, is meaningless or trivial.
Project findings indicate that adult content claims a small proportion of the Web. Approximately 2 per cent of the public sites 42,000 of the 2.2 million contain sexually explicit material. The mean size of a public Web site is about 129 pages, a 13 per cent increase over last year's estimate of 114 pages. The Web is dominated by a relatively small collection of "megasites" the largest 25,000 sites contain about 50 per cent of all pages on public sites.
The number of public Web sites has approximately tripled in the two-year period from June 1997 to June 1999, increasing from 800,000 to 2.2 million.
More information about the latest OCLC Office of Research Web statistics and analysis is available at: http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/projects/webstats/