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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.
...yeah, but it would only be 2 billion items if all the Janet Jackson stuff was removed. ;-)
Anyone else find it funny that Google has around one item for every man woman and child on earth?
eclecti.cc
While I love google, this is so obviously just a link to a press release, and even worse the first line of the press release cut-and-pasted onto slashdot's page. And is going past 6 billion really that important?
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
They beat McDonalds.
In a related story Booble's index just expanded to a Double-D.
Little boys across the globe will have sore arms tommorrow.
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.
exactly. I searched for "diode wave shaper" one time and got three hits -- all for porn. I had no idea diodes were so fap-worthy.
...that remarkably, a full five-sixths of the content consisted of different versions of the Google logo.
...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".
No it doesn't. It represents a pretty reasonable upgrade for Google.
It's expected as the web grows, so will the search engines.
This isn't exactly a man-on-the-moon accomplishment.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Notice that they claim that they search 6 billion items, but the home page only claims that they're "Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages".
To find the rest, we need to use Google's other services. The image search is claiming "Searching 880,000,000 images". Google Groups says its "Searching 845,000,000 messages". Add those to the count and you get 6,010,199,744 items total.
Maybe if more people used Google's Search Quality feedback form, it would help weed them out.
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
It just means bigger. There may well be innovation in the technology which allows bigger, that might have been news for nerds, but bigger itself isn't innovative.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
so much for the link to Google, I never would have found it otherwise.
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 was interested that they mentioned Google Print, which is Google's answer to Amazon's Search Inside feature, but hasn't got much press, and is pretty well hidden in Google itself.
You can check it out by limiting results to site print.google.com, e.g. searchterm site:print.google.com. (Not quite at Amazon-type numbers yet.)
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
That's a quote from the NYtimes (free req. yada yada) also posted as is here
If any other site were to track the stuff Google does,
Please note, this isn't a troll, and I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat (maybe I should?). Imagine the following scenario: a bomb goes off in the US. By tracing searches for "anarchist cookbook" to zipcodes within the area of the bomb blast, the FBI could have access to information that makes TIA look like a better alternative.
Maybe this isn't such a good feature after all...
have they beaten Ron Jeremy?
That reminds me of an old Dilbert (paraphrasing here, forgive the small errors):
PHB: We've run out of accounting codes! We can't do anything without one!
Dilbert: Why not upgrade the system to accept larger codes?
PHB: To do that we'd need a budget and an accounting code
Dilbert: Why can't we reuse a code from an old finished project?
PHB: Strangely enough, we've never finished a project.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Too bad the article doesn't mention how google is trying to fight gaming the PageRank system or any of the other problems like commercials in the results. Still a great search tool though.