Will we ever know how many pages are on the World Wide Web?
Google surpassed the trillion-page mark in its index three years ago (Google, 2008), and this doesn’t count the deep web that its search engine doesn’t index?
With millions of bloggers, amateur videographers, photographers and other web authors adding content by the minute, is it possible to measure the ever-growing Web?
Well, the man considered the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, is ready to try! His World Wide Web Foundation is launching a project called the World Wide Web Index with a $1 million grant from Google (World Wide Web Foundation, 2011). Its goal is to measure the size and impact of the Web in a series of annual reports. The first report is scheduled for early 2012.
It will be interesting to follow this project to see if society can track the growth and development of the Web. Tim Berners-Lee would like to do more to manage it – we’ll see if this is the first step in that direction.