Google Index at over 8 billion

By Charlene Li

Google was quietly making the press rounds this afternoon to update the size of their index – it’s grown to “over 8 billion” documents, up from “over 4 billion”. This comes just before MSN launches its own index.

For most routine searches, this isn’t going to make much of a difference – I’ll now get 20 million instead of 15 million results for a Google search on “digital camera”. But if I’m doing research on an esoteric topic – for example, photonic research in Micronesia – a bigger, more comprehensive index would help.

The larger index may mean more comprehensiveness, but not necessarily better relevancy – better results will still be dependent on the search algorithm making sense of the query. Which goes to show that it really isn’t the size of the index that matters, but what you do with it.

Comments

[Karan Bavandi]

I believe that aggregators like Moreover can be the difference in finding the right kind of information. Aggregating information from all types of proprietary sources and then applying comprehensive filtering will help researchers target and find information more effectively.

Further information category in themselves should act as powerful filters.