If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -To measure the exact size of the world wide web (i.e. a census). The measure used is the number of publicly accessible web servers on port 80. Design/methodology/approach -Every IP address on the internet is queried for the presence of a web server. Findings -The census found 18,560,257 web servers. Research limitations/implications -Any web servers hidden behind a firewall, or that did not respond within a reasonable amount of time (20 seconds) were not counted by the census. Practical implications -Whenever a server is found, we download and store a copy of its homepage. The resulting database of homepages is a historical snapshot of the web which will be mined for information in the future. Originality/value -Past web surveys performed by various research groups were only estimates of the size of the web. This is the first time its size has been exactly measured. IntroductionExactly how big is the web? Before this question can be answered, we must decide on a measurement. Possible measurements in decreasing order are:

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Electronic calendars are important tools that are used by consumers on a daily basis. However, scheduling a meeting that involves persons with different commitments and preferences remains a difficult task. Meeting scheduling is difficult because current calendaring applications cannot handle the responsibility of automatically and autonomously managing time slots. This paper presents a distributed multi-agent system architecture in which each person is represented by an agent. These agents automatically and autonomously work together to assist different users to book meetings on their behalf. Each agent has the capability to manage, negotiate and schedule tasks, meetings, events, appointments for its assigned user. In this multi-agent system, the agents coordinate their activities and negotiate on behalf of their associated users to find a solution that satisfies the users' meeting requirements and preferences. A prototype of this system is implemented to demonstrate how the agents can automatically book meetings.