Google Index Doubles

geekfiend writes "Today Google updated their website to indicate over eight billion pages crawled, cached and indexed. They've also added an entry to their blog explaining that they still have tons of work to do."

no update on the images

[bvdbos]

Unfortunately they didn't update [slashdot.org] the image-search [google.com] yet.

Google needs your cookie badly

[Anonymous Coward]

Until today you could save your google settings [google-watch.org] without loosing your privacy [google-watch.org]. You can still save those settings but google refuses to use them when you block their cookie. In my case I get 10 search results although I like to receive 100. Seems that they are making many dollars on a user's cookie, and now they are a public company my privacy is less important than "stock holders' interests".

Google domination.

[Anonymous Coward]

Local tabloid Aftonbladet is running a poll on search engine use:

Google (81.4 %)
Yahoo (2.2 %)
MSN (3.8 %)
Other (11.4 %)
Don't know (1.2 %)

61730 votes so far.

I'm a little surprised, either the masses who use the "default" (MSN?) aren't bothering to answer, or google is simply very very dominant and those "default using masses" do not exist [in this country].

Re:Google thieves my bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Google respects the robots.txt file. Use it.

Re:I'm all alone

[tadmas]

8 billion pages and not a single link to my blog.

Perhaps you should just tell them where it is [google.com].

Mine is bigger than yours!!!

[ayjay29]

From BBC News here [bbc.co.uk].

In a statement Microsoft said its search engine returned results from five billion web pages - more than any other search engine.

But this quickly won a response from Google which announced that its index has now grown to more than 8 billion pages.

Prior to the Microsoft announcement, Google was only indexing 4,285,199,774 web pages.

Steve Ballmer is soon to announce that his daddy is one hundrad years old, and kan kick your daddy's ass...

Re:Quality - not quantity

[dabadab]

"[i]Since pagerank was switched off[/i]"

Since when is Pagerank switched off?

Searching LiveJournal.com

[hackrobat]

Looks like they've added a gazillion LiveJournal [livejournal.com] pages to their index. I used to have a Google search box on my LJ that didn't throw up relevant results until last week or so. Now it works perfectly, just like builtin search (like what you see in MT and WordPress).

Competing with Microsoft's 5bn?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On the same day that this story hits the BBC [bbc.co.uk]. In that story Microsoft claim that they have 5 billion pages indexed, more than the 4.2 billion pages indexed (at that point) by Google. The BBC have just updated the story with the 8bn figure.

I smell competition!

Rich.

robots.txt

[ReKleSS]

Yes, this is probably a troll, but anyway... I take it you've never heard of the robots.txt file? You sound like you might want to read up on it. It's designed to help control the spidering of your pages for whatever reason, particularly cases like yours or situations where a spider would get confused and end up doing something stupid (recursive stuff, etc).
-ReK

Re:Google needs your cookie badly

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still save those settings but google refuses to use them when you block their cookie. In my case I get 10 search results although I like to receive 100.

Create a keyword bookmark [mozilla.org] with the URL

http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100 [google.com]

Give it the keyword 100, then type 100 search_term in the address bar to use it.

great but where are the .txt and directories?

[js7a]

Google won't be within reach of the pinnacle until they index .txt files, directory listings, and anonymous ftp sites.

Re:Google thieves my bandwidth

[jvj24601]

Well, if you know that Google is indexing your site and "stealing" your bandwidth, then you must have looked at the server logs, right? You'd see the name of the search bot is googlebot. Search for it [google.com], and you'll find that the first relevant link [google.com] explains how to prevent googlebot from accessing your site.

The logs would probably also show failed attempts to find the file /robots.txt. Similar info is gained from searching on that term [google.com] as well.

Re:More pages v.s more relevant pages

[__aahlyu4518]

Personally I find that the lack of relevant pages if the biggest problem with search engines, not the lack of pages with information.

Actually.... information IS relevant data. If it's not relevant to what you want, then it is just data...

Re:great but where are the .txt and directories?

[geminidomino]

One out of 3 [google.com] ain't a bad start. Add a few more keywords to narrow down the google-crawling.

Re:What?

[jez9999]

Erm, that's only because of the bizarre plus signs the grandparent poster put in - try this [google.com]. Note to grandparent: Just about any modern search engine assumes words not prefixed by anything are to be included in the Boolean search query. No need for +.

try +the

[leuk_he]

Yes there is, try to search for

The Doctor

vs

+the doctor

Re:meta-no-archive

[justMichael]

I'm sure I've seen some way of doing a sort of backwards search on a page, that will show all the pages in Google that link to it.

The search you are looking for looks like this: link:slashdot.org [google.com]

Re:Proximity search will help

[mazarin5]

Google has a near operator: *
Only useful in a quoted string.
Example:
Thomas * Edison [google.com]

Re:Makes you wonder...

[RedWizzard]

Maybe the steep increase is due to all the new file formats they are indexing now.

The steep increase is probably due to an architecture change. Google has, for a long time, been indexing around 4 billion pages. That implies that they have been giving each page a 32 bit unique identifier, and had exhausted that id space. It would be a lot of work for them to seamlessly upgrade all their software to support a larger id, and it has taken them a long time to do so. Now that they have the large jump in pages is simply due to the fact that they can index much more of the web.