Internet search giant Google has doled out one of those interesting little numbers that make keeping track of the Internet so much fun—except, in this case, the number isn’t little at all. According to Google, its systems that spider the Web looking for new content hit a new milestone: one trillion unique URLs on the Web at once.
Google admits that many of those URLs actually point to duplicate content or auto-generated information, but at the same time, the company doesn’t have any real idea how many unique Web pages might be out there: in theory, the total number could be infinite, especially since many applications and services effectively generate “infinite URL spaces” that can keep pounding out new, unique links in response to user requests.
The number of unique URLs managed by Google represents an enormous increase in the overall size of the Web: in 1998, Google says it indexed 26 million pages, and by 2000 that number had jumped to a billion pages. And managing all those URLs provides a glimpse at the kind of computational power Google puts behind its simple-seeming search interface: according to Google, if each URL represented a street intersection on a map, Google does the equivalent of exploring every intersection on every road on a map 50,000 times larger than the United States…with 50,000 times as many roads.
Fortunately, what Google doesn’t have to worry about is providing turn by turn directions from Fargo to Biloxi on that map.
