Google Celebrates 7, Where Did the 8 Go?

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear GOO-GLE, happy birthday to you. You're seven years old, in 14 more years you can have a beer, and won't we start getting weird search results then!

But while Google celebrates its 7th, the 8 seems to have vanished! References to 8 billion pages indexed are gone from the front page, as well as from the API page. (That page used to say "developers can query more than 8 billion web pages" but now says "developers can query billions of web pages".) Are we going to get a new index announcement? HMMMMM?

(8 billion reference is also gone from other pages, including http://www.google.com/technology/whyuse.html , http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html , http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/facts.html (hmm, they took the reference to the number of images searched out of that one too), http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html, http://www.google.com/intl/ro/press/descriptions.html, and http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html . However the 8 billion pages is still referred to at http://mobile.google.com/faq.html and http://scholar.google.com/press/descriptions.html, so who knows.)

Update: Oh, they blogged it. How 2005. They're describing it as "1,000 times the size of our original index" but not giving any numbers. But they're also saying "Google more than 3 times larger than any other search engine" which if you go by Yahoo's claim of 20 billion items would make Google 60 billion items strong?

Really?

Posted to Search Engines-Google