Dateline: 2/3/99
About six months ago I ran a little count of different types of media on several sites. It's time for a checkup and some new numbers.
Four sites were visited. The two sites, Geocities and Tripod offer free web pages. In addition I went to two major web searching engines, AltaVista and HotBot. All of the searches were simply for the words VRML, Java, Shockwave, and QuickTimeVR, RealAudio, and QuickTime. Following are the counts taken on 2/1/99:
| Search Results - Number of Hits 2/1/99 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VRML | Java | Shockwave | QuickTimeVR | RealAudio | QuickTime | |
| Geocities | 18161 | 168248 | 18020 | 104 | 36366 | 9293 |
| Tripod | 4405 | 74992 | 7888 | 29 | 10002 | 5405 |
| Alta Vista | 730652 | 5,371,809 | 579756 | 4849 | 876126 | 689464 |
| HotBot | 172260 | 1,437,860 | 85,350 | 1,610 | 205,640 | 141,040 |
Well looking at the two set of numbers it does appear that VRML is growing on the free Web page sites. Clearly the Web is growing even more! I'm not sure what else to surmise from the number but it sure is interesting.
| Search Results - Number of Hits 5/29/98 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VRML | Java | Shockwave | QuickTimeVR | RealAudio | QuickTime | |
| Geocities | 1709 | 24539 | 1945 | 13 | 4077 | 1569 |
| Tripod | 178 | 2908 | 355 | 0 | 420 | 227 |
| Alta Vista | 984070 | 6106230 | 595690 | 5527 | 788860 | 658030 |
| HotBot | 199318 | 2159859 | 130359 | 2827 | 216851 | 154100 |
Keep in mind that the hits are not for the presence of the actual media type, but for the word. If a page contains the word "VRML" anywhere than it's counted. However it seems reasonable to assume that the more widespread a media type the more hits it gets. Clearly this is quite unscientific...but ain't it fun!
One Year Ago in Focus on Web3D VRML98 It's the REAL Deal