Google Increases Size A Smidge: Was Planned Before Current Size Dispute

Last week, prior to the Yahoo index size announcement, we were notified that Google was planning to increase the size of their web index. To be clear, the new number that follows is NOT in response to the recent Yahoo size increase. In case you haven’t noticed by now and care, the current total index size listed on the Google home page is: 8,168,684,336. Previously, the total listed was: 8,058,044,651. It’s an increase of about 110 million pages. Google also upped their image database total last week. Like we’ve said many times, these numbers are only claims and mean little (except in the pr/bragging rights area) especially when comparing total database size with other engines since we’re likely not comparing apples with apples. I posted about this last week. Danny’s blog post from last November (when Google issued it’s 8.0 number only hours before MSN said their index was indexing about 5 billion pages) also discusses this topic.