Web address total tops one trillion

The number of sites on the internet has topped one trillion, says Google.

The search giant said that its databases have catalogued the mammoth number by counting URLs, recording each link within a page. The milestone number comes ten years after Google revealed its first site tally, which recorded some 26 million sites. By 2000, that number had grown to one billion.

Software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj said in a company blog posting that the figure only applies to unique URL addresses, and not actual web pages. "Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite," they explained.