8 Billion pages indexed, WOW

From article about delayed MSN search
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002087815_microsoftsearch11.html

That is very interesting...



Bottom of search page, explains the manic crawls of late from the new mozilla bot

This is typical Google, not showing all cards. For ages the number has been 4 285 199 774 pages indexed (since December last year(?)), and I have seen many speculations about Google being broken.

So when Microsoft claims they have indexed more pages, Google just throw in a larger number.

Nice to see that MSN is already giving google the eebiejeebies.

RUN GOOGLE RUN, LOL!

Jane

See also the blog propaganda thing on the G front page. The new number could be right though... I checked a couple of queries, and the total hits number was more or less doubled, even stayed up after I waded through the serps. Mind you I had to try this with narrow searches, under 1000 hits, for obvious reasons.

It does have a lot of pure, unrefined crap on the last serps though. I presume G is no longer very picky - they'll list just about anything

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LOL - "eebiejeebies" ? That's what thewormman's current avatar would say about his previous one

I don't recall Javascript being searchable before... Is it my memory failing, or is this new?

Hehe, I feel a new type of SEO (and a new set of SEO problems) coming up They might be exaggerating a bit, but I'm sure the basic JS stuff can be read by Gbot and its "master". Could be they're just going to list .js files, without knowing what they mean.

FYI - Yahoo is listing my favicon.ico file, G could expand even further

LOL...

I read somewhere on a google doc, one of the first @ stanford that we (google) have found some number of ways of tracking links from pages... now <a href is one what would be all the others if JS wasn't included...

Anyone know the documents i'm talking about ?

You have:

<iframe src="">
<?php include(""); ?>
<img [or whatever] src="">
<link href="">
<frame src="">
etc.

In the old days, they would only be interested in the simple <a href> stuff, but since bigger=better now ;)

Are you saying they ARE following these or is that a guess at what they MIGHT follow in the future?

Pure speculation. Or educated guess. I feel a new test is in order to verify G's claims...

Google is stretching the truth bigtime.

Because sure, I saw my # of indexed pages go up a lot, but when I start flipping throught the serps (inurl, 90% or more are just partial indexes, URL only.

So, yeah, Google may have crawled pages containing 8B links, or maybe even crawled 8B pages, but it did NOT index 8B pages. No way, no how.

Owen

Maybe they just added all the "supplemental" and the "omitted" results to the total number. It's fair, since they DO show up.

"Supplemental" is "duplicate" right? Then sure, that's fair.

"Omitted" meaning "Partically indexed" or "URL-only", then NO that's not fair. The statistic isn't 8B pages visited, it's supposed to be 8B pages indexed. All that is indexed in these cases are the URL, not the page. They can't (but apparently ARE) claim to be searching 8B pages, when clearly many of the pages simply aren't acutally IN the index.

MSN should use this in their advertising campaign, and trump Google's trump.

Actually, I've found that omitted=duplicate/similar (but possibly different) and supplemental=old page/few BLs. In my case that is. All my site's omitted and/or supplemental results (caused by poor SEO - I admit) are indexed though. They HAVE a title, snippet, even a cache.

But I agree that the no-snippet results should not be included in the number of "indexed" sites. Don't know if they are (but I suppose so)

Adding 4G pages of crap to Google's index is really a meaningless thing (except for just coming up with a number higher than Microsoft's, which is only 5G pages of mostly crap).

Why should we care if Google indexes 8G pages or 4G pages? Almost 90% of pages are doorway pages/dated material/spammy pages... etc...

Both Google and Mircorosoft are just playing a marketing game. I don't believe this has any effect on the quality of the search engine (or any other thing, for that matter)