number of documents in the world wide web?

[Jim Campbell]

        From Jim Campbell:

  An article in the current (October, 1995) issue of WebWeek says that Lycos
  "has registered more than 7 million URLs" and quotes the Lycos CEO as
  saying "We have catalogued more than 90 percent of the Web." If he's right,
  this week's answer is between 7 and 8 million documents. Who knows about
  next week. Of course, that omits a lot of information to which the Web
  provides some sort of gateway.
   
     -  Jim Campbell
   


To update my own posting: I just did a Lycos search. At the
top of the results page is the statement that Lycos had
found 8,545,325 unique URLs as of 7 October. Either WebWeek
has a long lead time to go to print (and remember that it would
better be titled WebMonth) or the CEO of Lycos doesn't use his
own product. Of course we don't know whether this increase of
one and a half million URLs represents all new URLs or in part
fills in some of the ten percent he didn't think they'd
covered.

But it's been ten days since 7 October. 10,000,000 sounds like
a nice round number for this week.

	-  Jim Campbell  (campbell at virginia.edu)