Google Now Claims 4+ Billion Documents

The main Google page claim has jumped from 2,469,940,685 web pages to 3,083,324,652 web pages. To get their number over 4 billion, they add in the 330 million images in their image database and the "nearly 800 million Usenet newsgroup postings" in Google Groups. The image number has remained static since Dec. 2001, but the Usenet postings have grown from 700 million then to "nearly" 800 million.

So what about their basic Web page growth? I am not sure what they are counting. On a few quick tests that I ran, Google did not seem to find that many more results than they did last March, and in some cases, they actually found less. It may be that the unindexed URLs and duplicates have increased substantially, but I have been unsuccessful in getting Google to comment on that. According to Google’s Nate Tyler, "more than 40 percent of these 3 billion web pages are authored in non-English languages" and "more than 50 percent of Google’s traffic comes form overseas," so perhaps much of the claimed growth comes in that sector.