Google Homepage Size Over Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Homepage Size Over Time

#51

Post by MikeCampo » Sat, Oct 13, 2012, 5:55 PM UTC

wilfra wrote: post #38

mithras wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't understand why they do that, igoogle is pretty good and I use it alot.

I don't even know what igoogle is or does. User adoption is what drives features like this to remain, not how useful they are.

That is true. This feature has been around for many years and used to be advertised on their navbar before Google+ came about, but it never stood out as a prominent component of the Google experience. I figure they are pushing people to adopt Google+ as their "portal" but I'm likely wrong as the two products are quite different. It could also be that it doesn't generate any revenue and the experiment is nearing the end of its life cycle.

Re: Google Homepage Size Over Time

#52

Post by TheGateKeeper » Sat, Oct 13, 2012, 7:14 PM UTC

MichaelApproved wrote: post #45

riffraff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, the DNS would be 8.8.8.8 anyway :)

But pinging it doesn't tell you if DNS service is up/down.

You should be running your own in-house anyways.

Re: Google Homepage Size Over Time

#53

Post by tgb » Sat, Oct 13, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

user24 wrote: post #49

27182818284 wrote: post #6

I always enjoyed this interesting story: One vigilante sent Google an anonymous email every so often just listing a number, like 37 or 43. Eventually Mayer and her colleagues figured out it referred to the number of words on the Google homepage—the implication being that someone was keeping track, so don't screw up the design – The Google Story

A friend of mine used to keep a post-it note on her monitor with 2,073,418,204 written on it. She was keeping track of the number of pages google reported it had indexed[1]. We got very excited when it changed to 3,083,324,652. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030205061559/http://www.google....

Does Google report this anywhere nowadays? I searched for it a while back and couldn't find it.

Re: Google Homepage Size Over Time

#54

Post by sovok » Sat, Oct 13, 2012, 11:10 PM UTC

tgb wrote: post #53

user24 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine used to keep a post-it note on her monitor with 2,073,418,204 written on it. She was keeping track of the number of pages google reported it had indexed[1]. We got very excited when it changed to 3,083,324,652. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030205061559/http://www.google....

Does Google report this anywhere nowadays? I searched for it a while back and couldn't find it.

I found only estimates: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ 40-50 billion pages. From the site:

"The size of the index of a search engine is estimated on the basis of a method that combines word frequencies obtained in a large offline text collection (corpus), and search counts returned by the engines. Each day 50 words are sent to all four search engines. The number of webpages found for these words are recorded; with their relative frequencies in the background corpus, multiple extrapolated estimations are made of the size of the engine's index, which are subsequently averaged. The 50 words have been selected evenly across logarithmic frequency intervals (see Zipf's Law). The background corpus contains more than 1 million webpages from DMOZ, and can be considered a representative sample of the World Wide Web."

Re: Google Homepage Size Over Time

#55

Post by stumm » Sun, Oct 14, 2012, 2:20 AM UTC

mithras wrote: post #31

jackfoxy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, Google is killing off the one thing that keeps me going to their sorta homepage , iGoogle. When they finally do kill it about a year from now, I'll have to come up with some substitute which may not be so Google-centric.

Yeah I don't understand why they do that, igoogle is pretty good and I use it alot.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better...

Re: Google Homepage Size Over Time

#56

Post by user24 » Tue, Oct 16, 2012, 8:26 AM UTC

tgb wrote: post #53

user24 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine used to keep a post-it note on her monitor with 2,073,418,204 written on it. She was keeping track of the number of pages google reported it had indexed[1]. We got very excited when it changed to 3,083,324,652. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20030205061559/http://www.google....

Does Google report this anywhere nowadays? I searched for it a while back and couldn't find it.

I'm wondering if they removed it because the definition of a 'page/document' changed to the point where it's no longer a meaningful number. I'm talking about realtime search etc. A shift towards viewing data as being delineated by the information it contains instead of the documents that contain it.