This morning the Google Blog announced a staggering milestone that even had Google engineers astounded; 1 Trillion unique URLs were found by Google on the web at once.
This statistic not only shows the amazing power of Google’s indexing engines but outlines just how massive the Internet has become… it is truly mind boggling.
The full blog posting is located here but the following are some interesting segments quoted from the blog posting.
- How big is the Net if that is what Google manages to index? “Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you.”
- Are all of those 1 trillion unique URLs indexed? “We don’t index every one of those trillion pages — many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn’t very useful to searchers.”
- How does Google manage so much information? “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.”
So at this point it is safe to say that the next milestone of 1 Trilliard won’t be far off (that is 1000 trillion unique URLs) at the rate Google’s capacity is growing; and the future orders of magnitude are even more mind boggling. Isn’t it wonderful to live in a world so connected that kind of information can be available at our fingertips? Zowweee!! What other word is there to describe such nirvana 🙂