Broadband Developments

Story on Cnet about Google’s rise in the web server market. Here’s some highlights from that article.

Google operates about 10.5 million Web sites in October, a 411,000 increase from September, according to statistics released Thursday by Netcraft, which monitors what software is used to host Web sites.

The figure comes from monitoring what Web server software is in use to deliver Web pages to people’s browsers. The top two packages are Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services, but Google has been catching up since.

Netcraft found 182 million Web sites total, of which 10.5 million used Google’s software. Apache ran 91.5 million of htem, and Microsoft’s IIS ran 62.8 million.

That gives Google about 5.7 percent share, according to NetCraft. But the fraction rises higher to 10.6 percent when measuring “active” sites, which screens out a lot of domains that just have a token Web pages with no real content.

Google’s own Web server software is gaining popularity compared to the top software products, Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services.

Google said in a statement, “The Google Web server is a custom-built server that runs on Linux.”