There are more than 8 billion pages in Google's index

November 11, 2004

"Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it's invaluable for queries that only return a few results", says Bill Coughran, V.P. of engineering at Google.

You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but Bill Coughran does.

He says it's a measure of how many pages Google has in its index and gives an indication of how broadly it searches to find the information people are looking for.

Yesterday, that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made him smile.

Now when Bill searches for friends who previously generated only a handful of results, he now sees double that number. These are not just copies of the same pages, but truly diverse results that give more information.

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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 is why Google keeps building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what it finds.

So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road. The real test is how well the search engine company does in finding what you want from within those pages.

"We'll keep improving that too", says Bill Coughran.

Source: Google's blog

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