Google Web index hits one trillion mark

26 July 2008

We all know Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and there are numerous reasons for that. Its uncluttered interface, for instance. When several search engines are busy putting unrelated advertising links on their homepages, Google's page with its simple search box with two buttons come as a breath of fresh air.

But the main reason behind Google's worldwide popularity and its entry into popular culture is its extensive database of links, which at the last count, has exceeded one trillion.

Two Google engineers on Friday said that Google's index of the Web now contains 1 trillion unique Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). In 1998, when Google opened for business, it had 26 million URLs.

By 2000, it had reached 1 billion.  In 2005, Google claimed it had more than 8 billion Web pages in its index, at least until it took the index count off its home page. In 2008, Google's measure of the Web is 1 trillion Web pages.

Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers from Google's Web Search Infrastructure team, admitted that Google doesn't know the total number of pages on the World Wide Web because they ''don't have time to look at them all''.

Moreover, ''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'' – without much user benefit. However, they asserted they are ''proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data''.