Google Announces 6 Billion Item Index

[Brittany]

Google, the search engine named after the mathematical term for a very large number ("googol"), announced today that it has expanded its index to include a very impressive 6 billion items.

“People worldwide can find more information with Google than with any other search engine," boasts Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products.

The 6 billion “items” included in the Google web index are comprised of 4.28 billion web pages, 845 million Usenet messages, several information pages related to books, and an image index that has doubled to include over 880 million images.

As if those numbers aren’t impressive enough, Google offers a wide variety of options for its searchers. Priding itself on relevant results, Google, which swept the 2004 Search Engine Watch Awards, offers services including: Google Web Search, which implements “powerful and scalable” technology and is capable of searching non-HTML file formats such as PDF, Microsoft Office, and Corel; Google Image Search, with advanced features allowing users to search by file size, format, coloration, and more; Google Groups, a 20-year Usenet conversation archive; and the newest feature, Google Print, a service allowing users to access book-related information.

This is just the latest accomplishment by the world’s most popular search engine in an effort to keep its searchers coming back for more. It's interesting because the March 2004 issue of Technology Review questions how long Google will be able to last at the top of the search engine world, with competitors such as Microsoft scrambling to find the next breakthrough search technology.

Any thoughts?

[Mel]

As with all Google Press Releases I tend
to take this with a grain of salt.

There is no mention of the fact that many of the pages which Google indexes are in their supplemental index, which seems is not routinely used for results, but only in cases of "diffcult searches" which IMO makes it kind of a second class index, where the inclusion of a page in the supplemental index seems to place it at the end of the que when rankings are being dished out.

Last month Google was saying that it had an index of 3.5 million pages yet it was reporting 5.4 billion pages returned for the search term +the. (Kind of hard to return more pages than you have in your index IMO). Tonight the Google home page shows that they are indexing 4,285,199,774 pages yet a search on +the returns 5,480,000,000 pages.

As always Google likes to keep us guessing rather than providing straight information.

[minstrel]

Any way you slice it, that's still a LOT of pages.

As for the supplemental index being "second class", I'm not sure I understand that - seems to me if those are not needed for routine searches but only for "difficult searches", most are probably secondary pages on sites which are already in the primary index.

[BOBW]

I know google is the best with the issue of relevancy of returns and I am very glad to be listedin google. I knoe that google is the many ISP's default search engine because it works. I am new to this game, but have studied it on the sidelines for years.

I am ranking good in Google.
I was returning on top in Yahoo, but now my site vanished from Yahoo. I am not listed in MSN, or Lycos, or Yahoo. I am listed in the ODP, but only for two weeks, now. I don't know if updates to databases for the ODP will help, or not. Let's hope the posting about it hurting is not true.

QUESTION for experts:
What is the best avenue for paid inclusion for Lycos, MSN, Yahoo, etc?

[Mel]

Any way you slice it, that's still a LOT of pages.

As for the supplemental index being "second class", I'm not sure I understand that - seems to me if those are not needed for routine searches but only for "difficult searches", most are probably secondary pages on sites which are already in the primary index.

Its not that they are not needed, just that they are not used. A search engine IMO should give equal opportunity to all the pages it indexes, not excluding some pages from the primary search results.

There seems to be no rhyme nor reason for the way sites are included in the supplemental index. One site dealing in jewelry for instance may have all its pages in the primary index, and another jewlery site may have all its pages in the supplemental index. Since there are plenty of results for jewelry terms if you site is put into the supplemental index you are never going to rank for any keywords no matter how good the site, since the index containing your pages is never included in rankings for your keywords.

This is what I mean by second class - not having equal opportunity to rank, all other things being equal.

[minstrel]

How does one determine which sites are in the primary index and which in the supplementary index (I admit I've never heard of the latter)? And how or why are sites chosen for one versus the other?

What you say seems to me to be a blatant contradiction of the founding principle of Google, viz., a democratic search engine.

[greeneagle]

An Associated Press Business Writer answered most of the questions in this thread within today's news article about Google.

"Google adds 1B more pages to Web Index"

I guess it takes a little preparation to list 1 billion new web pages, not to mention SERP jockeying. Obviously they are taking the new heightened competition from MSN, Yahoo and numerous startups very seriously. A 25% - 35% increase in indexed web pages, is quite a bit to digest at once. I don't think the ride is over on this one. No wonder Page Ranking activities have slowed down.

Off to the races - Maybe this should be dubbed the "Kentucky" update.

Here's the story

Ken

[cbp]

I was just driving home from work and its made the radio news!!!! The radio treated it as big news that Google reached 6 billion .... or it could be what they call a "slow news day"

CBP

[ldyguique]

Google Adds 1 Billion More Pages to Web Index

Google's search engine now spans 4.28 billion Web pages, up from 3.3 billion pages earlier this week. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also said it has enlarged its index of Web images to 880 million, up from slightly more than 400 million.

Even with the expansion, Google still isn't close to capturing the constantly expanding constellation of online content. By some estimates, there are 10 billion pages on the Web.

Groan. . .do you have any idea just how much of that is pure crud? It's like email spam. I get maybe 4 or 5 emails per day that are useful, but I receive well over 200/day. At least I don't have to look at all of the crud on the net before arriving at places I might want to be. I just have to look at some of it.

[cbp]

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=14169