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How many websites are there? - So, so, so many

Most webpages die after a couple of months. The average lifespan is something like 100 days. That's longer than it used to be. In the late 1990s, the typical webpage lasted for around 44 days.

According to statistics, in 1994 there were fewer than 3,000 websites online. By 2014, there were more than 1 billion. That represents a 33 million percent increase in 20 years. That’s nuts!

Various estimates say about three-quarters of web­sites are live but inactive.

The web’s ephemerality also means the precise number of websites at any given time fluctuates quite a bit. For instance, according to the site Internet Live Stats, there are now 935,950,654 websites as of this writing. (Now 935,950,713. Wait, 935,950,801. You get the idea.) «This is due to the monthly fluctuations in the count of inactive websites», according to the site. «We do expect, however, to exceed 1 billion websites again sometime in 2016».

The weird thing is most of these sites exist without being seen. The average person doesn’t venture very far across the web, only visiting 96 separate do­mains per month, according to a Nielsen estimate in 2013.

In August 1999, Google was fielding 3 million search queries per day. A year later, that number had leaped to 18 million search queries per day. In 2016 Google was serving more than 3.5 billion searches per day - equivalent to 40,000 searches every second.

Even as most websites flicker in and out of existence at a rapid clip, you can still find some real antiques out there. There still exist some ancient web­sites like CNN’s 1996 year in review, the old Bob Dole presidential-campaign website, and the search engine IFindIt.com, which you can see but it doesn’t seem to actually work.

When I started writing this morning, Internet Live Stats told me there were 935,939,044 websites online. Now there are 935,951,027 - almost 12,000 more websites! I have no idea how many disappeared in this time. Which brings me back to a truth about the Internet that’s often acknowledged but still hard to grasp: It’s always changing. I mean, always, ALWAYS. And though the web is never what it used to be, you can still find little traces of its previous iterations, if you know where to look.

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1.    In the late 1990s, the typical webpage lasted for around 100 days.

2.   The number of websites increased by 33 hundred percent from 1994 to 2014.

3.    It’s rather difficult to give the precise number of websites.