Study: Google runs more than 10 million Web sites

(Credit: Paul Ford)

There's no doubt Google is a vast power on the Internet, but because the company uses its own software to host Web sites, it's possible to see just how powerful.

Specifically, Google operates about 10.5 million Web sites in October, a 411,000 increase from September, according to statistics released Thursday by Netcraft, which monitors what software is used to host Web sites.

The figure comes from monitoring what Web server software is in use to deliver Web pages to people's browsers. The top two packages are Apache and Microsoft's Internet Information Services, but Google has been catching up since.

Netcraft found 182 million Web sites total, of which 10.5 million used Google's software. Apache ran 91.5 million of htem, and Microsoft's IIS ran 62.8 million.

That gives Google about 5.7 percent share, according to NetCraft. But the fraction rises higher to 10.6 percent when measuring "active" sites, which screens out a lot of domains that just have a token Web pages with no real content.

Google's own Web server software is gaining popularity compared to the top software products, Apache and Microsoft's Internet Information Services.

(Credit: Netcraft)

Google doesn't talk much about its internal systems, but said in a statement, "The Google Web server is a custom-built server that runs on Linux."

Google's sites include several with a profusion of user-generated content such as Blogger for hosting blogs.

[atish505]

Awesome. I wish they use Apache web server in addition to Linux which they use to run the web site.

I am in International real estate business. Our web site, email, calendar, and docs are hosted by Google though we use Outlook with Imap for desktop mail.

We are on Blackberry for Mobile but plan to switch to Android once the issue with battery is resolved. Hope fully Android phones from Samsung will be a lot cooler.

[someguy999]

I'm not one to normally just state my disbelief of hard metrics. But I don't believe it, if this was true then on average of the first ten entrees (that don't end in google.com) on a google search, 1 of them is running on google? Most people don't even know or have even heard of Google as an website hosting platform.

[therealbean]

"if this was true then on average of the first ten entrees (that don't end in google.com) on a google search, 1 of them is running on google?"

In abstract math,sure. In the real world, no. Google mostly hosts small business sites and blogs. I believe the stats in this post, although I admit the Google numbers are higher than I would have guessed.

[dcwoods]

>someguy999

Ever heard of Blogger?

[danield22]

The trend coincides with Google release of Google Apps, a collaborative platform wich includes Google Sites. Google Sites is a collaborative web page builder that makes it for ordinary user to build webpages. I built our website with it. See http://www.kainoshealth.net or http://sites.google.com/a/kainosmedical.com/intranet/Home

[mbenedict]

These stats are very misleading because they count "domains" instead of "servers". <illions of blogs running on Blogger are each counted as individual "sub-domains" against Google's tally, while in reality they're hosted as part of a single service not run from separate webservers.

Since the stats are grouping server products (Apache, IIS, GFE, etc) they should have counted unique webservers instead of adding up sub-domains. Otherwise Google's numbers are inflated.

Having said that, this kind of methodology can make Google look bad as well... if you aggregate the number of sub-domains hosting malware of any type (botnets, viruses, trojans, scareware, etc) then Google also shows up as the largest malware hoster in the world, since a huge amount of Google-hosted blogs are created by spammers to spread malware.

[richard96816]

This is all kind of silly since they are no doubt virtual sites, just like everyone else uses.

One machine can theoretically host a few million sites all by itself.

[dymphnaboholt]

Google does have a good habit of sharing its gear eventually, ie android so all in all, I see this as an excellent development.