1.5 Million Web Pages Born Daily, According to Alexa Internet

If ever the ad sales staff says there just aren’t enough new sites to satisfy the clients, have them read this. Alexa Internet said about 1.5 million new pages are being created every day.

Free Web navigation service Alexa said the data was determined from statistics collected through its two-year archiving efforts.

To date, the company said it archived 12 terabytes of data, equivalent to more than half of all the contents stored by the Library of Congress.

Some of Alexa’s other findings:

• A current snapshot of the Web is 3 terabytes, or 3 million megabytes
• The Web doubles in size every eight months
• There are approximately 20 million Web content areas
• 90% of all Web traffic is spread over 100,000 different host machines.
• 50% of all traffic goes to the top 900 Web sites currently available.

Alexa said its robots crawl the Web to gather periodic text snapshots (a full sweep of currently available public Web content) and mines this data to provide site statistics and related links to users of the free Alexa service. Alexa also donates a copy of each snapshot to the non-profit Internet Archive, which is dedicated to preserving the World Wide Web for future generations to learn from.

“Alexa’s archival efforts mean they’ve got more to say about the Web in general than any other Web data providers,” said Chris Shipley, industry analyst and editor of DEMOLetter. “This means businesses and organizations using Alexa’s statistics and trend data are tapping a vast data resource pulled from the most comprehensive archive of documents ‘born digital’–that is, electronic at conception and through publication -than any currently available source.”

Alexa, launched in October 1997, has clients that include Netscape Communications, the White House, Gartner Group and Encyclopaedia Britannica.