2008 saw the launching of the “Australian National Corpus Initiative”. Linguists and language technologists from around Australia committed themselves to a sustained push for the creation of a major addition to Australia’s research infrastructure in the humanities and social sciences, namely, a massive online database of spoken and written language in Australia, in all its forms and diversity and over time (Burridge, Haugh, Mulder and Peters forthcoming). One potential challenge to such an endeavour arises from the fact that a massive online source of language data already exists, namely the World Wide Web. In this talk I first consider why Web as Corpus cannot be seen as an adequate substitute for a national corpus. I then discuss the relative merits of Web as Corpus versus the creation of Specialised Web Corpora, and the relative potential of each to contribute to the future Australian National Corpus. I next outline two case studies investigating the relative utility of Web as Corpus versus Specialised Web Corpora in studies of specific pragmatic phenomena, namely im/politeness in emails between academics and students (Haugh forthcoming a), and “taking the piss” in everyday interaction amongst Australians (Haugh forthcoming b). I conclude by briefly discussing the implications of the various types of data considered in this talk for the ways in which such data is ingested and searched in the future Australian National Corpus.