top level domain

Ever wondered just how many domain names there are on the Internet? DaniWeb has, and can reveal the answer as being an almost astonishing 215 million worldwide.

According to global Internet infrastructure provider and domain registrar Verisign, more than five million domain names were added to the total during the second quarter of this year alone, which represents a growth rate of 2.5 percent above the previous three months.

To put that into some perspective, that's a year on year growth in the number of Internet domains of 8.6 percent or some 16.9 million domains.

The last time we asked that question here at DaniWeb was back in June 2009 when the Internet was, apparently, 183 million big.

Of course, it is bigger now, but not actually by that much if the new figures from Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign are anything to go by.

With the 25th birthday of the .com Top Level Domain fast approaching, it would appear that the Internet is now 192 million big.

Depending upon the level of your paranoia, Google is either attempting to take over the online world or simply trying to make it a better place in which to work and play.

This latest announcement does nothing to clarify these already muddy waters. "As part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster" says Google Product Manager Prem Ramaswami "we're launching our own public DNS resolver".

Two groups are working to set up a .gay top-level Internet domain, with plans for using some of the proceeds for registering sites in that domain to support gay causes, according to an article in the New York Times.