Growth of Internet users

Md. Abu Kausar (Research Scholar, Jaipur National University,

Jaipur, India)

Introduction
The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed the computer and communications
worlds like nothing before. The basic objective of the WWW is to create a
widespread information space for communication and sharing of information
among different users around the whole world. No other information system has
taken such a meaningful place in our life in short span of time than is worldwide
largest data network known as World Wide Web.
The WWW is becoming a common repository of text, document, images and
music etc. in a large scale never seen before. The success of web is based on the
idea of a standard user interface which is constantly the same no matter what
the platform is used to run the interface. As a result, the user is protected from
details of communication protocols, location of machine, and operating systems.
Further, any user can build its own web pages and make them point to any other
web documents without any restrictions. This is a key feature because it turns
the Web into a new publishing medium which is accessible to everyone. As an
immediate result, any user can push his or her personal plan with little effort and
almost at no cost. Moreover, people use computers and perform different type of
task daily on computers which cause a revolution. For example, online shopping
and home banking through internet is becoming very popular and have
generated several hundred million dollars in revenues.
Collecting the information from the Web and identifying related information
which matches a particular query is studied in the field of Information Retrieval
(IR). Nowadays, it is not possible to imagine the Web without the use of search
engines. The search engines join several complicated retrieval techniques and
become essential tools for navigating the Web.
Despite too much achievement, the WWW has initiated latest problems of its
own. Finding valuable information from the web is a very complex and tedious
task. For example, to satisfy his information need, the user may navigate the
space of Web links searching for information of interest. However, since the
hyperlink is very huge and almost unidentified, such a navigation job is generally
ineffective. For new users, the problem becomes harder, which might entirely
irritate all their efforts. The main difficulty is the absence of a well-defined
underlying data model for the Web, which shows that information definition and
structure are regularly of low quality. These complexities have attracted
improved interest in Information Retrieval and its techniques as promising
resolutions. As a result the Information Retrieval has achieved a place with other
technologies.
WORLD WIDE WEB SIZE
The World Wide Web has growing at very fast rate. Some studies have been done
to approximate the Web size and although they all report slightly different
numbers most agree that over millions of web pages are available on Internet.

There is no any method or criteria through which we can measure the exact size
of World Wide Web, but the approximate size of web can be measured through
the indexes maintained by some popular search engines.
The most popular search engine known as Google had 26 million web pages
indexed in 1998 and now it indexes around 67 billion web pages as shown in
Figure 1.

Figure 1. Estimated size of Googles index (Source: http://

http://worldwidewebsize.com/ accessed on Feb 3, 2016)
Other popular search engine Bing indexes around 16 billion web pages as shown
in Figure 2. The two most popular search engines, Google and Bing indexes more
than 46 billion web pages as shown in Figure 3. Other two search engine Yahoo
and Ask has stopped showing the total number of results, from the above figure
of web it cannot be concluded that they represent the accurate size of Web
because modern search engines can only crawl visible Web which is a little part
of the entire Web. Any search engine cannot indexes more than 20 to 30% of
web documents. A huge portion of secret data and other valuable information is
not accessible even through these well-known search engines. It is presumed
that the size of web which is not visible also called deep Web is many times
larger than the size of the accessible Web which is known as surface Web. Digital
books, library catalogues, journals, research reports, patents are some examples
of web documents that generally not allowed be crawling and indexing by search
engines. Many well-known search engines such as Google, Bing and many others
are opposing to find a solution for web which is not indexed by traditional search
engine.

Figure 2. Estimated size of Bing search index (Source: http://

http://worldwidewebsize.com/ accessed on Feb 3, 2016)

Figure 3. The size of the indexed World Wide Web (Source: http://
http://worldwidewebsize.com/ accessed on Feb 3, 2016)
GB = Sorted on Google and Bing
BG = Sorted on Bing and Google

INTERNET USERS
Now a day it has become an important part of human life to use Internet to gain
access the information from WWW. The current population of the world is about
7.349 billion out of which 3.34 billion people (45.44%) use Internet (see Figure 4).
From .36 billion in 2000, the amount of Internet users has increased to 3.34
billion in 2015 i.e., an increase of 928% from 2000 to 2015. In Asia out of 4.03
billion people, 1.611 billion (i.e.48.2%) use Internet, whereas in India out of 1.29
billion, .354 billion (28%) use Internet. Same growth rate is expected in near
future too and it is not far away when anyone will start believing that the life is
incomplete without Internet. Figure 4 illustrates Internet Users Growth in the
World from 1995 to 2015. Beginning in 1990, World Wide Web has grown
exponentially in size. As of today, it is estimated that it contains about 56 billion
publicly index able web documents spread on thousands of web servers all over
the world. It is not easy to search information from such a vast collection of web
documents available on WWW.

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3290
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3000

2497
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2500

1971
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2000

Millions of user

1500
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1319
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513587
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16 36
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1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

Year

Figure 4. Internet Users Growth in the World (Source:

http://www.internetworldstats.com accessed on Feb 3, 2016)
It is not sure that user will be able to retrieve information
even after knowing where to look for information by
knowing its URLs as Web is continuously changing.
About the Author
Md. Abu Kausar
Md. Abu Kausar received his Ph.D in Computer Science
from Jaipur National University, Jaipur, India in 2016,
Master in Computer Sc. from G. B. Pant University of Ag.

& Tech., Pantnagar, India in 2006 and MBA (IT) from Symbiosis, Pune, India in
2012. He has received MCTS. He is having 9+ years of experience as a Software
Developer &Teaching.