This month in 2006, the internet recorded its first 100 million websites. Not a patch on today’s 2 billion but quite the milestone!
According to Internet Services company Netcraft Ltd., on this day in 2006, over a 100 million websites existed on the internet. This milestone capped an extraordinary year in which the internet added an extra 27.4 million websites, easily toppling the previous year’s number of 17 million in 2005. The very first Netcraft survey in 1995 recorded 18,957 websites hosted online.
As time progressed, people were wanting to market themselves in different ways outside of the norm. Companies were moving into their own online spaces to generate new traffic and are often credited with having a large part in driving the incredible growth that happened in that year. Blogging services were increasing in popularity and free blog services through Google were a large part in making this happen.
There is such an abundance of information online now and the internet has solidified itself as an integral part of our working and private lives in just a few short years.
How does this compare to now?
Usage of the internet has changed over time. People have different reasons for surfing the web, whether it’s for work, catching up with friends, playing games or watching YouTube videos. Dial-up is now a thing of the past and the internet is now more accessible than ever before.
People have changed and habits have changed but what did the landscape look like in comparison to now?
Home computing was thrown into our lives in the early 1990s with dial-up providing a connection. There were several different portals to access the net in the 1990s such as CompuServe but AOL was the most popular. By June 2000, the AOL portal was receiving over 400 million monthly visits (for context, there were around 413 million internet users around the world at that time). When broadband hit the market and forced dial-up into obscurity, AOL lost its top spot and a new website took over – Yahoo.
Google was close behind, founding in 1998. Simpler and more efficient, the website quickly gained traction, knocking Yahoo from the top place and cementing Google as the most popular search engine of all time.
Over the next two decades, various social media sites appeared and marked a new era for online platforms. As of January 2022, YouTube and Facebook are still the second and third most visited websites on the internet.
Today, Google is still the leading search engine by far, making up about 90% of all web, mobile and in-app searches.
There are no signs of internet popularity slowing down but as things adapt and change over time, who knows what is in store for the future of the worldwide web…
Leave a comment!