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Google: We knew the web was big...

32 points| gaika | 17 years ago |googleblog.blogspot.com | reply

18 comments

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[+] sratner|17 years ago|reply
"Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections..."

Great! So now, all you have to do is give some sort of a comparison that lets people visualise exactly how big an area 50,000 times the size of U.S. is. May I suggest a metric based on whales?

[+] jmatt|17 years ago|reply
Average whale length = 12.8m (from top google search for average whale length)

Area of the US = 9.826630x10^6 km^2 or 9.826630x10^12 m^2

Area in whales of the US = 5.99769897x10^10 whales^2

So that would be 50000 times the size of 6 x 10^10 whales^2! Thats a lot of whale!

[+] hhm|17 years ago|reply
"Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page."

Strictly speaking, even that would keep the number of pages finite, even if very, very big. Any amount of data you can produce with any number of finite computers (with finite and bounded memory -there are practical bounds for memory sizes), will always be finite.

[+] derefr|17 years ago|reply
That's the same as saying an infinite data structure is finite; just because it cannot be practically evaluated before the heat death of the universe doesn't mean it isn't theoretically infinite.
[+] ntoshev|17 years ago|reply
Given infinite time, the number of pages that could be generated is infinite.
[+] aneesh|17 years ago|reply
TechCrunch is being cryptic (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/25/googles-misleading-blog...)

“Google also says 'But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.'

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today."

So, is it Yahoo or Live? If it's one of them, why would Google know it so well?. Any thoughts on what this could be? One of the TC commenters thinks its MSFT indexing facebook ...

[+] jrockway|17 years ago|reply
TechCrunch is being cryptic

Yeah, this is surprising... especially because Arrington would never lie to drive traffic to his site. Oh wait. TechCrunch.

[+] cypress-hill|17 years ago|reply
well allow me to modify my robots.txt so you can be at infinity-1. since you pricks decided to hijack your role as impartial algorithmic search to walled-garden with knol, i want nothing to do with you.

every major website that handles referrals seems to bite the poison fruit of capturing traffic...now google has to. oh well, maybe clusty search will have to do

[+] jrockway|17 years ago|reply
I don't think you understand what Google is. Google is a company that owns a popular search engine called "Google Search". They also have other properties, like GMail and Knol. What exactly is the problem with that?
[+] ntoshev|17 years ago|reply

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