How Big is Google’s Index?

December 28th, 2006 by Loren Baker, Editor | 6 Comments

Since Google has stopped exposing the size of their indexed web documents on their homepage, it seems that different web users have been performing searches to try and figure out Google’s size.

Some searches used to be “* *”, but according to Philipp, that search does not work anymore.

Google Blogoscoped is trying to figure out the optimal search terms for gauging the size of Google’s index.

Please lend Philipp your tips :)

Checking Google’s Index Size

a search for “to be” | -”to be” returns about 15,450,000,000 results at this time (theoretically, this search query – other than being a neat Shakespeare quote! – ought to return every page Google indexed, but practically this doesn’t seem to be the case, as the number is relatively low). The weird search query *-”a displays a page count of 17,960,000,000. What other tactics yield high or even higher page counts on Google.com?

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Comments

6 responses so far ↓

Scott Fish SEO on Dec 28, 2006 at 11:21 am

I have found: *-’a.$&%!@ yields 19,320,000,000 results. I have a feeling that some-how if you search all the “variable” keys, this will show you all the results in google.
Loren Baker, Editor on Dec 28, 2006 at 11:36 am

Good tip Scott!
L0j1k on Jan 1, 2007 at 9:47 pm

I have found the ultimate query, yielding (as of this comment) 23,070,000,000 results:

or | -or +*

Also, the number of yielded results seems to be incrementing. It went up by 40 million over the span of about an hour.
Axl on Jan 2, 2007 at 5:20 pm

I found one that yields 25,270,000,000 results. It is building off of the query of L0j1k. I just included a very common part of most Japanese sentences, a part that marks the subject of a sentence. It returns another 2 billion 2 hundred thousand pages :)
Axl on Jan 2, 2007 at 5:21 pm

I found one that yields 25,270,000,000 results. It is building off of the query of L0j1k. I just included a very common part of most Japanese sentences, a part that marks the subject of a sentence. It returns another 2 billion 2 hundred thousand pages :) Here it is:

or | -or +* OR ã¯

Sorry if you can’t see the Japanese part, you’ll need to have Japanese fonts enabled :)
Erik on Jan 23, 2007 at 5:23 am

The thing is that Google never has nor ever will return the exact number of matches for a query. They are all estimates. Hence finding the “perfect” query is pointless!