If the web were a vast savanna of content and webpages, search engines might be our safari guides, helping us navigate through miles and miles of barren wastes. At the moment, Google seems to be the guide of choice for most web travellers, and for good reason too: Google has reached over one trillion unique indexed URLs, according to a post on the company weblog by Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj. Contrast this to the paltry 26 million URLs Google had in 1998 when it first started out, and even the one billion the company had attained in 2000.
According to the blog: "Over the last eight years, we"ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!