---
title: "The internet in 1998"
description: "Google is founded, and searching stops being useless. 2,410,067 websites, 56 kbps at home, $100 for a gigabyte of storage — and what a download actually took."
url: https://atoneplace.net/internet-in/1998/
site: "At One Place"
---

# The internet in 1998

**The internet in 1998: Google is founded, and searching stops being useless.**

2,410,067 hostnames · 56 kbps dial-up, the fastest a phone line could carry and the end of that road.

Search before Google was genuinely bad — results were ranked mostly by how often a word appeared on a page, which is trivially gamed and was gamed relentlessly. PageRank ranked pages by who linked to them, treating a link as a vote, and the improvement was immediate enough that the product needed no marketing. 56k was the ceiling for dial-up and everyone knew it; the interesting question had become what would replace the phone line.

## The numbers

- **Websites:** 2,410,067 hostnames responding to HTTP
- **Typical connection:** 56 kbps — 56 kbps dial-up, the fastest a phone line could carry and the end of that road.
- **A gigabyte of storage cost:** $100, in 1998 dollars

## How long things took to download

*Assuming the connection ran at its rated speed throughout, which it did not. Real dial-up throughput after protocol overhead was typically 10 to 20 per cent below the modem's rating.*

| What | At 56 kbps |
| --- | --- |
| A 3 MB song | 7 minutes |
| A 5 MB photo | 12 minutes |
| A 700 MB CD image | 1.2 days |
| A 4 GB film | 6.9 days |
| A 50 GB game | 87 days |

## What arrived in 1998

- Google, incorporated in September
- PayPal, as Confinity
- The iMac

## And what ended

- Netscape's independence, acquired by AOL in November

## The thing people misremember

> Google was not the first search engine, or the tenth. AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot and others all predate it. What was new was ranking by inbound links rather than by page content.

## Against the years around it

| Year | Hostnames | Typical speed | $/GB of storage | A 4 GB film took |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1996 | 257,601 | 28.8 kbps | $500 | 13 days |
| 1998 | 2,410,067 | 56 kbps | $100 | 6.9 days |
| 1999 | 3,177,453 | 56 kbps | $30 | 6.9 days |

Between 1998 and 2020 the typical connection went from 56 kbps to 100 Mbps, a factor of 1,786, and a gigabyte of storage fell from $100 to $0.020 — a factor of 5,000. The 4 GB film that took 6.9 days takes 6 minutes.

## Common questions

### What was the internet like in 1998?

Google is founded, and searching stops being useless. A typical home connection was 56 kbps, there were about 2,410,067 hostnames responding on the web, and a gigabyte of storage cost $100.

### How long did it take to download a film in 1998?

A 4 GB film at 56 kbps would have taken about 6.9 days, assuming the connection held its rated speed the whole way, which it would not have.

### How many websites were there in 1998?

About 2,410,067 hostnames responded to HTTP. That counts hostnames rather than distinct sites, which is why the figure occasionally falls between years without the web shrinking.

### What do people get wrong about 1998?

Google was not the first search engine, or the tenth. AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot and others all predate it. What was new was ranking by inbound links rather than by page content.

## Related pages

- [The internet in 1996](https://atoneplace.net/internet-in/1996/)
- [The internet in 1999](https://atoneplace.net/internet-in/1999/)
- [Every year side by side](https://atoneplace.net/internet-in/)
- [Convert data units](https://atoneplace.net/convert/)

## Sources

- Web Server Survey — Netcraft (https://www.netcraft.com/blog/category/web-server-survey/)
- ICT Facts and Figures / World Telecommunication Indicators — International Telecommunication Union (https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/)
- Historical cost of computer memory and storage — Compiled from contemporaneous retail advertising and manufacturer price lists (/about/)