Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
7.3. How much data is in these different archives?
The size of things varies (you already know that) because the Internet is
growing on a daily basis. With that in mind, at last count, there were 4,500
Gopher servers with archived information in the Veronica database (each server
has, as a guess, at least 200 items of information, meaning that the total
Veronica database encompasses roughly 900,000 documents and files). Archie
servers typically have archives of over 2,000,000 files and documents, and
there are over 500 known WAIS databases (WAIS is really a database of
databases, where each database within is known also as a WAIS database. Is this
confusing enough yet?).
There are over 6,000 Usenet newsgroups distributed throughout the world (though
probably 60 percent of those are regional or organizational in distribution,
such as seattle.* for the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington or
netcom.* for groups that are for Netcom users only). Within that, there
are, I would estimate about 1800 FAQ documents that "live" in a specific
newsgroup or other. For example, the Internet Services FAQ list lives in the
Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.services.
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