This is how many websites there are
Tim Berners-Lee published the world's first website in 1991. Image: Reuters/Fabrice Coffrini
- British physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first website in 1991.
- 3 years later, the internet housed around 3,000 sites, one being a fledgling version of Yahoo.
- In 2021, there are now around 1.88 billions sites.
30 years ago, on 6 August 1991, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland published the first ever website, the WorldWideWeb (W3). Fittingly, the site was about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web and how to use it. Hosted at CERN on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, the site’s URL was http://info.cern.ch.
By the end of 1992 there were ten websites online and, after CERN made the W3 technology publicly available on a royalty-free basis in 1993, the internet gradually started to grow into the all-encompassing giant that it is today. A "Website" is defined a unique hostname, i.e. a name which can be resolved, using a name server, into an IP Address.
By 1994, there were close to 3,000 sites, one of which was a fledgling Yahoo! which, originally called 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', started its online life as a web directory. By the time Google came onto the scene there were over two million websites. As our infographic shows, there are 1.88 billion websites today and looking at Internet Live Stats' counter, this figure is currently increasing at a fast rate.
Don't miss any update on this topic
Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Stay up to date:
Internet of Things
Related topics:
The Agenda Weekly
A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.
More on Emerging TechnologiesSee all
Matt Price and Anna Schilling
November 20, 2024
