PC Pro (www.pcpro.co.uk) announced on November 11 that the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) has doubled the size of its index of the Web. The search engine can now trawl through eight billion pages to find the information that the users request.
Bill Coughran, vice president, Engineering, notes in the Google Blog that the real benefit of this enlargement lies with the queries that generate fewer results. He writes that comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it's invaluable for queries that only return a few results, that the index comprises standard, HTML Web pages, PDFs, PowerPoint, Flash, Postscript and JavaScript, that eight billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road, and that the real test is how well Google does in finding what the users want from within those pages.
