Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
The first Google index in 1998 had 26 million pages (not websites), and by 2000 the Google index reached one billion. Now it has 1 trillion pages - 1000 billion pages. Wow. Google hasn't indexed all 1 trillion pages; for example, they don't index duplicate content. But that is still a whole lotta URLs for Google to search through to find results for your query. Are you using the best keywords for your query so Google can find the page you want out of 1 trillion pages? As the web keeps growing, it seems more important than ever.
What are the last 5 things you searched Google for? Were you able to find what you were looking for?
Hint: If you don't remember your last 5 genealogy searches, go to http://google.com/ and click on "My Account" . Scroll down to "Web History". This will show all the web pages you have visited and all the Google searches you have performed. Look for the last 5 "Searched For" to find the last 5 Google Searches you did.
How did you do? Were you pleased with your results? If not, you can get some ideas for better Google searching at Surname Searching and More Google Search Tips.
By the way, 1 trillion is a hard number for me to grasp. It puts things a little more in focus when I realize that a trillion seconds = 31,546 years. And yet Google can complete a search in hundredths of a second.
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