OK, I admit this is semi-useless information… but I was wondering just how many documents are in the big search engines today. It’s easy to find information on how many net denizens there are in the world (1,114,274,426 – no more and no less) how many domains are active (87,043,715), and how many new domains got registered yesterday (2,039,625). But how many pages are out there?
No-one’s telling. Yet you’d have to assume the search engines, whose business is basically to go out and find them all, would know.
After a quick search I found that the method people were using was to enter the search term *a* and see what the total count was. I did it a few times and got different results throughout the evening, but here they are anyway:
- Google - 29,610,000,000
- Yahoo! – 13,500,000,000
- MSN Live – 2, 550,000,000
There’s a lot of commentary about how useless this information is, and why search engine relevance is the important thing. I totally agree. If I enter a search for something and find that I’m viewing result 1-10 out of 44 million, well that’s useless information. I’d rather have just one result, which of course is the one I was looking for in the first place (even though I didn’t know it at the time).
