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November 11, 2004
Google reaches 8 billion pages
According to the latest post in the Google blog (and the notice on the first page of Google) Google now crawls 8 billion pages. According to the blog:
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. The same is true for obscure topics, where you're now significantly more likely to find relevant and diverse information about the subjects. You may also notice that the result counts for broader queries (with thousands or millions of results) have gone up substantially. However, as with any search engine, these are estimates, and the real benefit lies with the queries that generate fewer results.
The documents in Google's index are in dozens of file types from HTML to PDF, including PowerPoint, Flash, PostScript and JavaScript. Together these pages represent a good chunk of the world's information, but hardly all of it. That's why we keep building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what we find. So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road. The real test is how well we do in finding what you want from within those pages. We'll keep improving that too.
Its very interesting that we see Flash and JavaScript mentioned in the types of documents indexed by Google. Yahoo! and MSN at the moment seem to be losing the total number of docs count but the race is still on...
Posted by Basileios at November 11, 2004 06:09 AM
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