The web has grown more in 2005, having added 17 million websites thus far in the year, than it did at the height of the dot-com boom, in 2000, when the web grew by 16 million websites, reports the BBC, citing a study by internet monitoring firm Netcraft, which ascribes this year's growth to the large numbers of small businesses going online, firms making the most of web advertising schemes, and spammers. In its October 2005 survey, Netcraft found 74.4 million web addresses, an increase of more than 2.68 million from September, breaking the record from five years ago.

The first such survey by Netcraft, 10 years ago, found only 18,957 sites. Five years later, the figure was 19.8 million. In the past, some estimates have put the number of active sites at roughly half those counted by Netcraft, which considers a newly registered domain a site.

Still, the firm says much of the recent growth is real, citing the ease of launching online businesses, small business's adoption of the web, the rise of blogging, registrars' making use of unused domains to exploit Google's and Yahoo's ad systems. Also spammers are setting up domains to try to push their products to the top of search rankings.