More than 1 trillion…

Posted on July 26, 2008

McDonald’s announced in 1963 via signs at all their restaurants — ‘more than 1 billion served.’

Google has just announced an almost unbelievable figure as well. They have now discovered over 1 trillion unique URLs. 1 trillion!

What may be even more amazing is the web is growing by several billion pages every day.

They, of course, don’t index every one of those pages since many are redundant and a lot of them are auto generated by web scripts that run from a server and provide a dynamic page to the viewer.

It had been a while since Google made any public mention as to the size of its index. That’s a topic that used to generate a lot of controversy among the major search engines in the past.

All of that became irrelevant when it became obvious that people didn’t care about how many hits they got on a search but, in most cases, what the first two pages of results showed. Let’s face it, not many people go any further into the results than that. Generally speaking, if a good result isn’t obtained in two pages, most people will refine their search terms and try again.

With that in mind, it will be interesting to see if this announcement brings any sort of reactions from the rivals.

Google also shared information about how and with what frequency it analyzes these links.

“Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections,” the officials wrote.