COURSEWORK

Coursework

Coursework

Internet Population

Internet has made life easier as compared to the past but, with the growth of internet so rapidly, it is also a concern. Internet is an important tool today and, several official and non-official works are depended on internet. Millions of users are connected at a time to the internet and, making it difficult to measure the internet population. Several statistics that are gathered in early days of the internet use provide the hosts that are connected to internet or the amount of traffic (Fu et al, 2010, pp. 486-492). Numerous universities gather these statistics on behalf of research and scientific organizations because, at that time only these research institutes were the users of internet.

In 2001, according to the report of The Face of the Web: 2000: 2001, a study was conducted by an international research Ipsos-Reid. This report illustrated that Americans were the largest internet population but, with the continuous usage of internet in other parts of the world their share percentage fell from 40% to 31%.

In July 2001, several researches investigated that internet users were in between 164 and 166 million which was approximately 59% of the US population. These figured did not highlight the military computers which were invisible due to security reasons.

Size and Growth of Internet

When considering the estimates of the current size and growth rate of the Internet, there is so much variability in the use and definition of internet population. There are different indicators of internet population such as; domain name, host computer, web host, and web page.

Now we focus on the problems which are creating hindrances in estimating the internet population. The one problem is due to the measurement of size of internet and, this is because several domain names are unused. Individuals and organizations are allowed to buy more than one domains by making a web site. Several individuals and organizations buy hundreds and thousands of domain names because; they also want to resell them after sometime. These domains can be easily searched out with the search engines or Web crawlers and their content is invisible or negligible.

Web Domains

The other problem is that it is difficult to count the number of web domains as there are large number of web domains in the world of internet. Several domain names are existed on the exact same site. Let us take an example of barnsandnoble.com and bn.com which point to the same site (Fu et al, 2010, pp. 486-492). There are also other sites which are considered as the mirror site and, these sites are the duplicates of the original site or servers. These are created to eliminate the network traffic and also enhance the better availability of the Web site. It also allows downloading in a quick mode for users to the mirror site.

It has also been researched that number of web hosts is increasing day by day. According to the research of Alexa Research's, there are web servers which represent serve pages ...