Google detects a trillion URLs

An American trillion, that is

GOOGLE HAS DETECTED more than a trillion unique URLs on the Web according to the outfit's bog site.

Apparently the World-Wide Wibble is growing at a speed of a billion pages a day.

Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers in Google's Web Search Infrastructure Team said that Google didn't have to index every one of those trillion pages as many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content.

Google has not made public pronouncements about the size of its index for a while mostly because other major search engine players tend to hassle it about its methodology.

We can expect a round of reactions from rivals like Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com.

Google also mentioned how and with what frequency it analyses its links.

It said that it re-processes the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, it does the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States.

Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the US, with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.
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