Web: Google searching 9,105,590,456 pages [en]

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As I announced in November, Google doubled its index to eight billion pages, and posted proudly on the home page:

Searching 8,058,044,651 pages

Small problem, this information has not varied since, although the size of the index increases regularly. Here is a screen copy of today's page (Google.fr):

Google obviously indexes new pages everyday. For example, this blog's pages join the index very quickly, usually in less than 48 hours (see request). Even if we suppose that Google adds only the blogs in its index, and even if it indexes only a fraction of the six new blogs which are created each second (the Technorati site lists more than six million blogs at the moment), the index size should change rapidly.

However, at the same time, Google changes the count of individual words. I applied the same requests on 16 words on November 22, 2004 and on January 22, 2005:

Word	Nov. 22, 2004	22 jan 2005
Aznar	1690000	1600000
Bernadette	1920000	2250000
Blair	14100000	15800000
Chirac	3120000	3280000
Claude	15600000	17900000
Coluche	161000	193000
Corona	6750000	7430000
Jacques	19000000	21400000
Jospin	669000	768000
Poutine	272000	316000
Raffarin	752000	893000
Saddam	11100000	12400000
Sarkozy	838000	695000
Thatcher	2140000	2770000
Veronis	62600	60100
Zidane	1090000	1280000

There is a quasi-perfect correlation between the results obtained at these two dates (determination coefficient> 0,999!):

The slope of the regression line (1.13) gives us the progression between November 22 (very little time after the publication of the index size by Google) and January 22. This enables us to estimate the new size of the index (8,058,044,651 x 1.13). I am thus happy to announce it: Google's index exceeds nine billion pages . Google should thus post:

Searching 9,105,590,456 pages

The size of the index thus increased roughly by a billion pages in two months. I have no means to know whether the progression is linear, but one can safely predict that the index will reach 10 billion pages before the end March .

Why Google doesn't update its home page? If they intend to hide the progression from their competitors, it is rather ridiculous since as this post shows, it can be estimated in a very simple way.

This small annoyance is less serious than the bug on advanced research that I reported the other day, but all these sloppy details end up throwing suspicion on the quality control at the Google house. Of course, for the moment only professionals are concerned with these things. They do not make the smallest difference for requests about yellow pages or Britney Spears (see this post).