Is Google Throwing Out Billions Of Pages?
I always liked that little “number of pages indexed” at the bottom of the Google homepage… back in the days when they were competing with Inktomi (now Yahoo) and Altavista (now, err, part of Overture, which is part of Yahoo) to have the largest index. I guess now the competition includes Microsoft. Back then, it didn’t!
I was wondering how big Google’s index is now. I found a page saying that the specific search query, *-”a yielded 17,960,000,000. The page is dated December 2006.
So I tried the same search query today and got 11,900,000,000 results.
Does that mean Google has kicked out six billion pages from its index? That’s almost exactly a third!
(Using the *.* search used to return 25 billion documents, but that search no longer works, so it can’t be used in a comparison.)
A shrinking index would account for the recent decreases in PageRank that people have been seeing… if the index has shrunk by 1/3rd, then there’s less PageRank to go around.
Google still claim to have an index, “more than three times larger than that of any other search engine“. Can that still be true if their index is shrinking?
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:53 am
There’s also no telling how google is interpreting the *-”a query. I wouldn’t take these numbers very seriously.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Neil, can you really depend on this search of yours as reliable?
Don’t you think Google may deliberately HIDEe the true numbers just to fool the public?
Just my thought…
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:28 am
Well, my thoughts are that Google may be shrinking their index to offer quality over quantity. They just don’t want to admit that anyone else has a larger index for prestige reasons.
My test wasn’t exactly scientific, but I was hoping it would start a debate as to what’s really happening.
Neil.