After flexing their muscles about claims of number of pages indexed by between yahoo and google, some evidance are begging to emerge that points out that google has increased the number of pages indeed.

Numbe of pages google display on its homepage “©2005 Google - Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages” is wrong and would be updated by google soon.

Danny Sullivan has published on searcheginewatch blog a way to sort of calculate numbe of pages indexed in google.

The way to calculate pages suggested by Danny is simple. After reading this blog I thought of trying it myself. Its a 2 step process.

• Search for a word that does not returns any pages in google. “CountAllThePagesInGoogle”.
• Then use google searches negative operator to search for all the pages that did not contain that term -”CountAllThePagesInGoogle”

This results in count of 9,570,000,000 pages.

I then tried the same approach with a word that is there in google search and results in pages.

• I used the and it resulted in 9,150,000,000 pages.
• I used -the and it resulted in 1,330,000,000 pages.

This adds up to 10,480,000,000 pages. So this technique seems to work… sort of. We have to wait till googles goes public with the number of pages it holds in its index.

This test does not work on yahoo and askjeeves it does seem to work in msn though and results in 5,322,521,243 pages which is close to msn’s claims.