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Forwarded message:
From: dlepage at mediom.qc.ca (Denis Lepage)
Sender: owner-ukbirdnet at dcs.bbk.ac.uk
Reply-to: dlepage at mediom.qc.ca (Denis Lepage)
To: ebn at otax.tky.hut.fi
Date: 97-08-29 07:45:41 EDT

Hi all,

I hope people are not already tired of this subject. I agree
with Stig that no page can include all links to bird-related
pages. So, out of curiosity, I looked on 5 different search
engine on the web for the number of bird-related web pages.

I looked for the following keywords:

bird, birds, birdwatching, birdwatcher, birdwatchers,
birding, birder, birders, ornithology, ornithologist,
ornithologist, uccelli, fugle, oiseau, oiseaux, aves,
vogels

which produced the following (tremendous!) results:

www.excite.com: 408 229 pages
www.hotbot.com: 385 540 pages
www.altavista.com: 321 381 pages
www.lycos.com: 84 219 pages
www.webcrawler.com: 28 101 pages

The results speak for themselves as to which engines
are to most comprehensive (for birds, at least). Excite
and Hotbot have a database of about 54 Millions pages,
which make about 0.8% of the web devote to birds.

This, of course, includes a variety of topics, not all
of primary interest to birders, birdwatchers or ornithologists.
With HotBot, I thus tried to exclude the pages containing
some of the following keywords, assuming that many commercial
pages or pages devoted to cage-birds are not what birders want:

pet, pets, exotics, cage, sales, buy, hotel, hotels, motel,
motels, Inn, Breakfast (as in Bed &), Cottage, Cottages,
Rental

Moreover, this number includes all multiple files included in a
single web page. For example, in my page about birds of Qubec,
I have 52 html files. If I search HotBot with my e-mail (that is
included in all of my files) as a keyword, I get 51 files (I just
missed one). Hotbot is my favorite search engine right now; one of
the reasons is that you can be very specific as to what you want.
You can for instance only ask for index pages (the main page of a
web site). If I do that while searching my e-mail address, I end up
with only one page: http://www.ntic.qc.ca/~nellus/index.html, my
index page (that is somewhat impressive: you can find the right page
out of 54 millions if you have the correct keywords!).

If I apply those two filters to all the bird links above, I reduce the
number to 15 139 pages. By doing this, I also exclude pages where
birds is not the main topic of the page. It doesn't count the pages
not in one of language tried (probably a few in Japanese, Korean, etc.
but most are also translated to English), and still includes a good
number of pages not of primary interest to birders (ie, this number
still includes all pages made by Joe Bird, pages about bird recipes,
poems about birds, personnal pages where birdwatching is mentionned
as a favorite activity without supplemental information, etc.). Some
of them may also be counted more than once.

Thus, the real number of bird web page is probably closer to 10 000,
probably not much more, maybe less (which is already enough to fill a few
cold winter nights for someone who wants to read them all!).

The last thing I did was to use only the more specific keywords (ie,
remove all terms meaning only "bird(s)" in all language):

birdwatching, birdwatcher, birdwatchers, birding, birder,
birders, ornithology, ornithologist, ornithologist

With the "index" filter, I got 2237 pages, which is probably more
representative of the real number a pages really related to birdwatching
and ornithology, in my opinion.

So the final answer: between 2500 and 15 000, depending on what you
decide to include in your definition of bird-related pages.

Hope you may find this useful,
Cheers,
Denis Lepage
======= ATTENTION : NOUVEAU E-MAIL / NEW E-MAIL!!! =======

| / /
who?| | Denis Lepage (Quebec) dlepage at mediom.qc.ca
who? | | Departement de Biologie, Pavillon Vachon
|| | | Universite Laval (Qc) G1K 7P4 CANADA
(oo) | | (418) 656-2131 ext#6327 / Fax: (418) 656-2043
| | | |
| | | | Les oiseaux du Quebec/Birds of Quebec (WWW)
--""----| | http://www.ntic.qc.ca/~nellus/index.html

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