As recently as 1992, the World Wide Web was largely unknown an an information resource. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European center for nuclear research, its goal was to establish a global communication sytsem. But only a few knew of its existence.

By 1997, it was estimated that there exist 320 million distinct web pages. Even the most powerful search engines can index less than 1/4 of the available pages. (cite). Similarly, it has truly become a "worldwide" web as only a small handful of nations (e.g. Afghanistan, Libya, ...) do not connect to the Internet (cite).

In January, 2000, Inktomi and NEC reported that the web now consists of more than 1 billion pages, delivered from 4.9 million different web servers. They base their data on their commercial web indexing operations. They also noted that the English language dominates web publishing (87% of all pages) and commercial sites dominate the web servers (55% of all servers) (chart).

This growth is even more remarkable since nearly all of its content is limited to free resources.

The web should grow even faster once the technology for a web-based pay-per-view is perfected, since this will permit commercially-valuable information to be shared electronically.