The frequently numerical Tristan Louis has an interesting post about the size of Google’s index and the idea the company now sees MSN as its nearest competitor (no surprise there.)
Google has 24 billion items indexed, considers MSN search nearest
Yahoo says its index is over 20 billion items, but as John Battelle points out, it’s not clear who’s zooming who.
Tristan writes:
“The original index was 24 million pages. From there, it is easy to multiply by the 1,000 factor they talk about in their blog and get a number of items in the Google index.
That number would be 24 billion items in the Google Index, a little more
than what Yahoo! has in their index.”
He’s got some nice analysis plotting and exploring the growth curve for Google and MSN–
* Growth Curve of 50%: MSN Index is now 7.5 billion items
* Growth curve of 75%: MSN Index is now 8.75 billion items
* Growth curve of 100%: MSN index is now 10 billion items
And concludes “… it appears that the Google index is sitting somewhere between 22.5 and 26.5
billion items indexed and, more probably than not, at the 24 billion items indexed mark. This gives it a slight edge over the Yahoo! index and shows that the company considers Microsoft its nearest competitor.”
The whole thing is worth a read if you’re a metrics geek.