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Google's Bigger Index
WebGangsta writes "Google Inc. today announced it expanded the breadth of its web index to more than 6 billion items. This innovation represents a milestone for Internet users, enabling quick and easy access to the world's largest collection of online information."
... this will lead to an increase in the integrity of PageRank(TM), and vintage Google will return in all her glory.
How many of these 6 billion items are in the form of www.massivepopups.com/your_search_term.html
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Anyone else find it funny that Google has around one item for every man woman and child on earth?
eclecti.cc
What's going on here? This isn't like Google to put out a press release just because the index size just past a round number.
Is Google setting up for its IPO and therefore becoming less like the Google we know and love?
I'm waiting for them to come up with a sound search and an image search that look at the subject of the image rather than its file name. After that I'm not sure what's left. Maybe comparative searches for sounds and images, where you can upload a source to compare? Who knows! I hope these guys don't follow the normal path of spiralling into inconsequence after they go public.
...is how to get rid of those pseudo-pages in Google. The ones with names like "thing_that_youre_searching_for.html", and all they are is either a page of dead links to crap on ebay, or a "Hey, we do great searches for your stuff".
Google has become so flooded with internet crap that it's quickly losing its status as a useful tool. Google needs some form of moderation to move out the superfulous blog entries and advertising fronts so it can someday become as useful as it always was.
transmission_err
I however find my post while googling for words they also contain.
How can one explicitely forbid Google from indexing a site ?
Sorry, I'll keep using Altavista.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I don't want MORE things to search for, I want it to return more relavant searches. I know that the information I usually search for is out there, the problem is that there's so much chafe out there, that I can't find what I want. No matter what I search for, there are at least 2 or 3 responses related to porn. I understand that their are alot of variety of porn out there, but common... Search engines are getting even worse by throwing in search results that are hardly relevant, just because they got paid money by the company. I would even be willing to pay for a "google membership" if they eliminated the advertisers mixed in with search results and maybe gave me another special feature or 2. I'd want a search engine that returns just 1 or 2 good results over one that returns 5 good results mixed in with 200 bad ones.
I do hope they manage to sort out their recent indexing problems first. For many searches altavista is now showing far better relevent result searches than google - since their attempted cull of 'spam' sites last december which kind of backfired. They have improved things this year, but the quality of their search results is not as good as it was last year. Now, they need to figure out how to get rid of all the useless sites that are just shopping directories full of espotting URLs and similar and with no real content. Funnily enough, their anti-spamsite code seemed to actually promote these up the rankings on many search terms, while penalising many sites containing genuine content.
Many people said that Google were using deliberate tactics to encourage small e-commerce websites to spend more on adwords, but I believe this wasn't deliberate - their index is so big that they simply can't tell what the results of their changes are going to do to the search orders for all the search options that people are going to use - and they simply didn't realise in advance the problems they were going to cause. And google have made efforts to minimise the damage since then, but they still need to do more.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
I heard that Google is using 4-byte ints for DOCids and they have been running out of indexing space since they are pretty close to 2^32 pages already. Is that true?
I am still waiting for a search engine that does topic matching instead of text matching. In other words, I would like the search engine to return a list of urls with relative topics instead of relative text. As it is right now, all search engines, including Google, return pages that contain text equal or relative to the input but they might be 98% unrelated. I still can't consider the Internet as a library of knowledge due to this fact.
For example, if one searches for "TCP/IP tutorials", it would return many unrelated links like posts in newsgroups, college lectures, etc.
And the press release doesn't say that they're indexing over 6B pages, so anyone who's saying that here is mistaken.
With 6 billion pages indexed and cached, and maybe an average of 50K per page (which is probably pretty conservative - it's probably twice that in some cases), that's nearly 30TB, IICIC!!!
The hard disk and RAID folks must LOVE Google....
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
There is an interesting article in Wash Post Search For Tomorrow on Google, and possible AI in search.
Some excerpts:
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Both Google and Fast have image and picture search. They're all right. But I have had more luck with Lycos.
What are your experiences?
Of course, none of these services search in the image data itself. They search filenames, special features (like image size), and the content of the pages they are found in.
What is the state of searching in images today? Facial recognition systems have existed for a while, but they are made for a specific purpose.
How long before we can take a picture of that piece of your IKEA furniture and find the same model in pictures of celebrity houses, Babylon 5 sets and crime scenes? Or taking a picture of that familiar-looking person walking down the street, searching for her, and remembering that she was in that "reality" series two years ago.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
The thing that is starting to bother me is not the search-spam (easily removed over time with increasingly smart ranking), but the mailing lists. If 20 sites around the net archive the same mailing list, then I'll get the first 20 hits in most techical searches from the same list. Google really needs some way to identify duplicate archives (which is hard given that they're all formatted differently) and treat them as one "site".
... Advanced features include search by image size, format (JPEG and/or GIF) ...
They didn't mention PNG, the turbo-studly image format which Google Image Search does indeed support.
It seems they used to have very few PNGs in their database, but now a search for +a filetype:png returns 700,000 results!
Phillip