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And Someday We’ll Have Ads on Every Single One of Them

In 1998 Google indexed 26 million unique URLs. In 2000, it indexed one billion. And now, eight years later, it has indexed one trillion. Astonishing to find that the Web contains that many unique URLs. And thing is, there are still more to be indexed. “… How many unique pages does the Web really contain,” Google engineers Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj ask in a post to the Google (GOOG) Blog. “We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! 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. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the Web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.”

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John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.

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