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 :)
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?
I have found: *-’a.$&%!@ yields 19,320,000,000 results. I have a feeling that some-how if you search all the “variable” keys, this will show you all the results in google.
Good tip Scott!
I have found the ultimate query, yielding (as of this comment) 23,070,000,000 results:
or | -or +*
Also, the number of yielded results seems to be incrementing. It went up by 40 million over the span of about an hour.
I found one that yields 25,270,000,000 results. It is building off of the query of L0j1k. I just included a very common part of most Japanese sentences, a part that marks the subject of a sentence. It returns another 2 billion 2 hundred thousand pages :)
I found one that yields 25,270,000,000 results. It is building off of the query of L0j1k. I just included a very common part of most Japanese sentences, a part that marks the subject of a sentence. It returns another 2 billion 2 hundred thousand pages :) Here it is:
or | -or +* OR ã¯
Sorry if you can’t see the Japanese part, you’ll need to have Japanese fonts enabled :)
The thing is that Google never has nor ever will return the exact number of matches for a query. They are all estimates. Hence finding the “perfect” query is pointless!
odd…
-’a.$&%!@?* turns in slightly more results than
*-’a.$&%!@
but
it only yeilds 13,320,000,000 results on google for me… and this is a year and a half later!
also the other two supposed 25 billion result suggestions yeild like 1-5 billion O,o weird lol
and the internet is DEFINUTELY bigger in 1.5 years so idk whats up
As of september 13th, 2008 @ about 1.34am i searched for “a” in google.ca and it returned
Results 1 – 100 of about 25,320,000,000 English pages for a. (0.09 seconds)
25.32 billion pages.