How large is the World Wide Web? Is it 60 billion pages? 100 billion pages? 1 trillion pages? No one really knows for sure and the reason we don’t know is simple. People keep creating new pages.
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, several thousand to maybe 100,000 new pages of Web content have just been created across the World Wide Web. Isn’t that amazing? And yet we will never know where they all are. Those pages include Tweets on Twitter, forum posts, spam pages, blog posts, and other pages.
You have to ask yourself what is a Web page? Is it just anything that is formatted in HTML? For example, is this page any less a real Web page than this page? What is the real difference between the two of them?
Some pages are static. They will never change or only vary rarely. Some pages are dynamic. They will change often or constantly. But if you put a little date function on a page and that is all that changes on the page, is the page static or dynamic? Where do you draw the line?
When you look at pages like this you are probably just looking at the very top of the iceberg. After all the links on those pages have to lead to other pages, and those pages must lead to other pages. It goes on and on.
You have to wonder where the World Wide Web begins. Some people would say it began with the first Web page ever posted at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, but did all subsequent Web pages come online from links on his page? Of course not!
The World Wide Web is an amazing concept. It just keeps on growing, almost like matter spontaneously bursting into existence across the universe! It may one day become larger than the Earth can hold, but will we still be around to know that?