Google Search Index Booms to 8 Billion
Google had something up their sleeve. It seems that whenever a competitor does something big, such as MSN announcing the beta launch of their new search engine, Google has to “one up” them somehow. Just as the news wires started flaming with MSN Beta search news and its 5 billion indexed web pages, Google posts this simple sentence on its web site “Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages.”
What’s the meaning? Why this timing? Well the folks at Google seem to know that journalists and bloggers are going to jump all over the MSN Search story with their “MSN Challenges Google” and “MSN Search Takes on Google” headlines. And what’s the most effective thing the incumbent most powerful search engine can do? Simply respond without responding. Google’s statement about its pages indexed can be easily translated into “Oh, MSN has 5 billion pages, that’s nice… Google has over 8 billion indexed, try and top us Bill!”
Googlebot has been going crazy lately, hitting sites left and right with different IP addresses which have led many in the industry to believe that there are two or more Google bots sucking up every last sentence on every web site they can fine in the visible web. On the Google Blog today, Bill Coughran, VP of Engineering commented on the new Google index:
You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It’s a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you’re looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages.
Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it’s invaluable for queries that only return a few results. For example, now when I search for friends who previously generated only a handful of results, I see double that number. These are not just copies of the same pages, but truly diverse results that give more information.
hmm, is it just me or is this comment leaving system broken, sorry for this test but seems I can’t post a comment right now for some reason
Ah, works finally. Haven’t been THAT big surprise really unless you have been living eyes closed :)
Already long time certain searches were showing way over 4 billion pages, search for word THE gave about 6 Billion pages as I earlier pointed in comment for http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=988 (Google Flaws and Fixes) article.
Page amount have been going up quite while but they didn’t update static number on front page where it claimed that famous +4 Billion pages.
In reality this update “only” brought in less than 2 billion pages from what were indexed two weeks ago, still nice big boost in index size, but no way near doubling indexed page count :)
Go by the quality of the index, not by the numbers. I can darn well say that a huge number of pages with duplicate content still exist in Google, especially the ones like Amazon APIs and other web services-enabled pages. It would be worth the wait to see whether Google finds a way to exhibit something like this: …billion unique pages in the index.
There are now huge piles of duplicated pages and most likely always will be, sadly :/
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