Well it appears that the on-line bug has finally become a plague.

According to UK-based NetCraft there are now over 100m websites hosted on the planet:

Previous milestones in the survey were reached in April 1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million), September 2000 (20 million), July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40 million), May 2004 (50 million), March 2005 (60 million), August 2005 (70 million). April 2006 (80 million ) and August 2006 (90 million).

Apparently the rate of growth has accelerated considerably in the past year with over 27 million new sites since January. That far outpaces the equivalent figure for the whole of last year – 17 million new sites.

Of course the real significance here is that more content makes things harder to find, and when things are harder to find on-line most people turn to the search engines.

With so many sites out there competing getting found has never been so important.