Concordancing the Web with KWiCFinder

The World Wide Web is a wondrous place, with an overwhelming variety of information in countless languages and domains. Just how many webpages there are and how they are distributed by language and content are not easy questions to answer. The Web is constantly growing and changing, and even the best estimates can only approximate its extent and composition. Studies of the nature of the Web echo the story of the blind men and the elephant: each extrapolates from different samples of an ever-evolving entity taken at different times and by divergent means. The most reliable estimates suggest that the number of publicly-indexable webpages in mid-2001 falls in the range of three to five billion (i.e. thousand million = 10), a number projected to grow to 10-15 billion by mid-decade; others believe these figures too conservative and place the actual numbers at two to three times as many.