Google Expands Every Whichaway

Google today announced the expansion of their image search, Web search, and Usenet search.

Web Search -- Google's Web search now offers more than 2 billion documents, 25 of which they say are non-English Web pages. When I asked how many of the pages were non- HTML pages, Google representative Nate Tyler said, "There are more than 35 million non-HTML documents. These include numerous file formats such as PDF, Microsoft Office and Lotus documents."

Google's Web search seems to have expanded its news results -- do a search for "Afghanistan" and you'll see that news results pop up with source and time (I'm guessing that's time indexed.) It doesn't seem to work for most proper names, though -- "bin Laden" and "George Bush" got news results, but "Princess Masako" and "george clooney" didn't.

Google Groups -- Google Groups has both left beta and now includes a 20-year archive of Usenet conversations (all the way back to 1981.) That's 700 million postings in 35,000 different categories.

Google Image Search -- Google image search has been expanded to over 330 million images. It still seems to be restricted to JPEG and GIF, though -- I can't find any BMP or PNG files anywhere. (Is BMP even used anymore?)

Posted to Search Engines-Google