how many English language web pages are there?
May 11th, 2010 | 
Author: hypothesis
a Google search on the word “the” can provide a measure of the number of English language web pages on the internet.
method
i searched on the word “the” on Google, with SafeSearch on “Strict,” for English language web pages. (strangely enough, with SafeSearch off, i found fewer pages!)
i believe these numbers are not sites, but pages. e.g., Wikipedia.org is one site with 7.640 million pages.
results
| Start Date: | Tues. | Wed. | Thurs. | Fri. | Sat. | Sun. | Mon. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Numbers are reported in billions of web pages. | |||||||
| May 11, 2010 | 20.610 | 20.790 | 21.210 | 21.220 | 21.150 | 21.160 | 21.760 |
| May 18, 2010 | 21.720 | 21.730 | 22.460 | 22.230 | 22.240 | 22.030 | 22.090 |
| May 25, 2010 | 21.970 | 22.220 | 22.140 | 22.730 | |||
conclusion:
it appears from these data that the number of English language web pages containing “the” available via Google Search is currently approaching 23 billion.
EDIT: in a following experiment, i determine that there are at least 4.8 billion English language webpages that do not appear (to Google Search) to contain the word “the.” so any estimate of the total number of English language web pages should be incremented by approximately 5 billion, i.e., it appears that as of the end of May 2010, there are approximately 30 billion English language web pages out there.
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