Google Hits an Eight-Billion Page Index

There have been rumors swirling around for the past week or so about the Googlebot going mad and indexing tons and tons of Web sites. There was a lot of speculation -- was it an error? Google trying to outrun Microsoft's upcoming search engine announcement? What the heck?

As it turns out, it was Google making its index vastly larger. Much larger. Like eight billion pages. As the front of the site says, it's "Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages".

And because this is the age of the 'blog, they've also got a blog entry about it at http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/11/googles-index-nearly-doubles.html . Bill Coughran wrote it, and among other things he says, "the real benefit lies with the queries that generate fewer results." I couldn't agree more, Bill, so how about please supporting more than ten query words at a time so I can really narrow down my searches?

It doesn't appear that there have been any syntax changes, and while the Google API page has been updated with the new page count it doesn't appear that there have been any API updates, but I'll be doing some experimenting with the new data set.

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