number of documents in the world wide web?

[Jon Knight]

On Tue, 17 Oct 1995 guthery at austin.sar.slb.com wrote:
> >An articles in Forbes estimated 70MB on the Web.  Web crawlers were
> >the cover story.
> 
> Oops ... fingers faster than eye ... 70GB, of course.

70GB?  Is that all?  I think someone is seriously underestimating there. 
Considering that some _very_ large databases now have Web front ends, 70GB
seems a tad on the small side.  After all, I've got 1.5GB of disc space on
the workstation in front of me, and my guy I share the office with has
another 1.5GB on his machine.  OK, so not all this is devoted to Web
accessible material but then again we're doing development work and not
providing user services from these machines.  Even so, I've got 25MB of
stuff in my DocumentRoot.  Another one of my servers has 147MB of Web
accessible material (an archive of networking bits and bobs) and seven
issues of a Web based e-journal I did has 47MB devoted to it on another
machine.  Chuck in our library OPAC (web front end), the main HTML based
campus CWIS front end (109MB), quite a few more people like me here and we've
probably got at least a gig of material online here at LUT.  Now consider
Sunsite, wuarchive, etc, etc... 

I'd reckon that 70GB is more likely to be a big Web index size rather 
than the data available on the Web.

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Department of Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
********** Heureusement ces champignons ne sont pas radioactifs. **********