Google finds the web has over 1 trillion unique URLs

1,000,000,000,000. That’s how many URLs Google has found on the web. Obviously, that’s a huge number and it’s even more impressive considering that it is only unique URLs — to get to the number, Google removed all pages that have multiple URLs with the same content.

Other things of note from Google’s post on the matter:

• Several billion new individual web pages are popping up in its index each day
• The first Google index was in 1998 and it counted 26 million web pages
• By 2000 the Google index hit the one billion mark

One trillion isn’t even the total number of web pages out there, it’s only the one Google has found — and not even Google can count them all. At least not yet. As it notes, there are technically an infinite amount of web pages when you take into account things like online calendars whicha allow you to go forward and back in time as needed, creating a new page each time.

Perhaps most mind boggling is this remark from Google:

This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. 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.

[photo: flickr/fabooj]