The World Wide Web (WWW) is big. How big? No-one really knows. And the answer to the question very much depends on what is being measured and how. There are approaching 400 million WWW users in the world. For the UK, the figure is about 20 million. Nearly half the population access the WWW every day. More than a third have bought goods or services online spending an average of almost ?500 each. Over 4 million UK businesses are online.
Another way of thinking about the size of the WWW is to take the number of pages that are available. The problem with this approach is that we are then dealing with the kind of numbers few of us can readily comprehend. Google, the world's biggest search engine, routinely audits 8 billion pages and indexes around 5 billion pages. But this is merely the top layer of the WWW.
Beneath the Surface Web lies the so-called Deep Web of content that resides in searchable databases accessible only by direct query. If the Surface Web is big then the Deep Web is gigantic. According to US research and development organisation, BrightPlanet Corporation,
"The 60 largest Deep Web sources contain 84 billion pages of content."
But Google's index is probably more than enough for most purposes. And what is significant is not so much the number of pages but the fact that each of these pages is connected to every other page. Research has shown that any two randomly selected sites on the Web are connected, on average, by only 19 clicks. It is this connectedness which makes the WWW such a powerful resource.
For individuals, the WWW represents perhaps the ultimate realisation of the Reithian ideal of democratic access to education, information and entertainment. Whatever your interests, whatever your tastes, it's all out there.
For businesses, the WWW represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Love it or loathe it, we cannot sensibly ignore it. Whether it is no more than an online "brochure" or a full-scale e-commerce operation, every business has to decide the form and scale of web presence that is appropriate for them.
Article originally published in Business Perthshire Magazine
