Google’s search index hits one trillion page mark

Google announced recently that their search engine has indexed over 1 trillion unique web-pages from all over the globe.

“We knew the web was big,” the article on Google’s official blog begins. “Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs.” This article also introduced the indexing technology behind the stage.

Google, known as a popular international search engine, has servers all around the world to index the pages. With the rapid development of the Internet, the number of web pages with unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is growing by several billion per day alone. Back in 1998, Google had an index of about only 26 million pages. Within 10 years, the number increased over 38 thousand times.

In the early years of the competition of search engines in the 90s, comparing the number of indexed pages was thought to be the best way to compare the engines, while today, users find it more important for a search engine to return better related pages rather than none-related ones.

Though the competition of searching engine is quite tough these days, Google still boasts lots of new technology, such as PageRank and text-analyzing, and lots of sevices like the well-known Gmail (originally providing 1GB space for each free user, firstly seen as a joke for April Fool’s Day, later attracted lots of users in 2004), WAP search, Blogging, Google Earth, Google Moon, and range-specialized and customized search.

Source: Wikinews