Where to Start?

Using ODP to count some... Many people submit their website at a popular free directory on the Internet known as Netscape's Open Directory Project (ODP) ( http://dmoz.org/). Here submitting a site if free and all popular search engines such as google.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com, msn.com use this directory. So if a site is listed at ODP, it is most likely to be found by search engines which is exactly what every site owners want. When a new site is born, we can assume some of them to be in the ODP. In December 31 2001, this ODP directory had 769 listings of Nepali websites. The sites listed under its category http://www.dmoz.org/regional/asia/nepal are sites authored in English language offering contents relevant to Nepal region and hence they can be called as Nepali websites. As on December 31, 2002, the date of writing this article, there were 934 websites. Those two different numbers taken in different period in time tells us that about 165 new Nepali web sites were added to the directory during the year 2002. Within the ODP directory Nepali sites can be anywhere. For example, football related Nepali sites are found on http://dmoz.org/sports/Soccer/AFC/Nepal category, but such sites in small numbers. After searching the entire directory, we find about 7 New Nepali sites to add to our findings.

Furthermore, some interesting facts come from our website www.nepalvista.com/newsite.html The site maintains listings of New Nepali websites with site icon, description and the dates when they were added on the Nepal Vista Directory. Here by counting manually the sites that do not appear on anywhere else we get 25 such new sites. Some 45 new Nepali personal homepages found on the free server sites such as geocities.com, netfirms.com also are new to our findings. We now have some numbers to play with. Let's go further.

We go to www.google for some interesting search! Search for sites using the keywords "a" site:.np to find over 60,000 web pages containing the word `a’ and from websites hosted on the sub domain .np. We assume that at least a page will have the word `a' any where on it and that we know .np refers to a domain name of a website hosted in a computer server here in Nepal. Since 60,000 are actually the web pages but not the website, we evaluate the search results again. We also know that the results are not comprehensive, there might be sites registered under .np but not submitted to the google's directory. We verify our findings with the Mercantile Communications P Ltd (One of Nepal's Internet service provider) who maintains .np sub domain name directory. Mr. Suraj Adhikari from the web department of the company, in an interview, says, "Our record shows that 3900 .np sub domains were registered in 2001. Today the number is 4000. That means about 1000 .np domain names are registered in the year 2002. We can assume about 45% of these sites to be hosted" So this tells us that about 450 New Nepali Websites hosted under the .np sub domain were probably born in the year 2002. We do a random sampling of search results for 50 new Nepali websites from the above search results of google. After sampling we find a percentage of activity of Nepali websites and percentage of any Nepali websites to be valid as Nepali websites.  We need the website to active, and it must be written in Nepali or English offering content relevant to Nepal region. This gives us a result of 317 New Nepali websites hosted in .np sub domain.

Now lets search deeper into other search and directories keeping note of every new Nepali website we find. Finally we also go to Nepali portals such as info-nepal.com and thamel.com. All these findings gives us 7 such new Nepali websites that we can add to our list. 
Let's tabulate our findings here. Next..>>