How many Web pages are there out there, really? More than 1 trillion, Google reports.

The fact is that no one knows the exact number, and the fact that a lot of the content is hidden behind database search forms means that we never will.

Still, the search engine companies make a living out of spidering the Web, trying to find all the good stuff, and they probably have a pretty good idea about what size we are talking about here.

The Google Blog now reports:

“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!”

The blog truthfully reports that this is not the total number, as Google has not indexed all the pages there is. Moreover, there are problems of defining what a web page is:

“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.”

It is, in truth, a mindbogglingly large number. The first Google index in 1998 (the year Pandia was created) had 26 million pages, and we thought that was a huge amount of information!

In ten years the Web has changed our lives in ways that it is still hard to understand. The only comparable technological innovation we can think of is the printing press, but it tool several hundred years before that one had a similar effect.

See also our article The Size of the World Wide Web from this February.