The Web and Benford's Law

[gdt]

Benford's Law (Frank Benford, 1939) says that numbers starting with small numerals are more likely to be encountered in nature than numbers starting with larger numerals. Dr Karl has a good summary.

Although I can't be bothered to run the few thousand samples through Google, it looks like Benford's Law holds for web content. Note the distribution at (9) to (11):

hits(1) = 9,470,000,000), hits(2) = 3,110,000,000, hits(3) = 2,760,000,000, hits(4) = 2,430,000,000, hits(5) = 2,350,000,000, hits(6) = 2,050,000,000, hits(7) = 1,940,000,000, hits(8) = 1,880,000,000, hits(9) = 1,760,000,000, hits(10) = 2,560,000,000, hits(11) = 1,920,000,000.