Google Now Indexes 3 Billion Pages!

[Kal]

Yep it's true (http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/2002/oct31nov6.shtml#googleturns). FAST is still at 2.1 billion - wonder if they'll ever catch up? ;)

[Advisor]

Damn...now I have to go in and change my Presentation. I think it says 2.5 billion or something...

[scottiecl]

Wish I could find all 3 billion!

I tried for an hour to find a site I needed to link to last night and ended up having to drive out to the business and get the URL off their sign.

Turns out it was a PR1 and even variations of the business name would not pull it up.

Still, Google is king. :king: I hope Fast does catch up and give us all some variety.

[Advisor]

Scottie, did you try searching for it in another engine like Fast or something else?

J

[scottiecl]

Yes-I tried several search engines. This is a tiny, dinky little site that I needed to link to for an article.

It just irritated me to find out Google knows they exist but wouldn't return them! Hopefully, my link will boost them enough to get them ranked a little better.

[Advisor]

It just irritated me to find out Google knows they exist but wouldn't return them! That's disturbing, and shouldn't happen. What words were you using to search? Were there any very company specific words you could have used to find them? Do they come up now if you know their company name and/or URL?

I'm sure that Google would not be happy with their own results in this instance if you were using half-way decent words to search with and still couldn't find them.

I was looking for the website of a school my daughter might go to next year, and couldn't find it at all either. Got some sites that mentioned the school, but there was never the official school page. I only found it because it was on a brochure they sent me. I never did check to see if Google actually had it indexed, but it didn't show up. If that's the case, that would again be very bad! I'll have to check on that because now I'm curious. I just assumed they didn't know about them for some reason. Although the site did not look brand new. Looked very old, actually.

J

[scottiecl]

The site is Derrick's Azalea Farm and that is how I typed it in, even tried Derricks azalea farm sc and south carolina and it did not come up.

It is a pretty old site with only a few sentences on each page- actually, I wrote to the guy about including him in an article and he's probably going to be a client for a redesign and optimization.

I've found that problem before- I had a site with embedded flash in (there was still text and text links to follow) that I could not get ranked for more than a year. Google knew about it but wouldn't return it unless I typed in the exact URL. Even the exact page title didn't pull the page up. I yanked the flash snippet finally and in 2 months it was #1 for it's keyword phrases. No kidding- that was the only change. It was already optimized and no bw links were added in that time period. Somthing about that flash embed was choking the spider~ I just decided I didn't know enough about the "safe" uses of flash to bother with it anymore.

Point being- Google seems to have sites in the index that don't get ranked for any terms at all, from what I can tell. So 3 billion indexed doesn't mean they return all 3 billion in the serps.

[Advisor]

Point being- Google seems to have sites in the index that don't get ranked for any terms at all, from what I can tell. So 3 billion indexed doesn't mean they return all 3 billion in the serps. No, it doesn't mean much if they can't return the sites! I'm sure this is the sort of thing that they work on every day...try to get these little sites found. Otherwise, they need SEOs more than ever, and we know they don't want that to happen!

J

[Kal]

Originally posted by scottiecl
I yanked the flash snippet finally and in 2 months it was #1 for it's keyword phrases. No kidding- that was the only change. It was already optimized and no bw links were added in that time period. Somthing about that flash embed was choking the spider~ I just decided I didn't know enough about the "safe" uses of flash to bother with it anymore.
Yet another reason not to use Flash. I really hate it! If I may, I might use your experience as an example to some Flash-happy clients :rolleyes:

[scottiecl]

Feel free to quote me Kal!

It's only anecdotal evidence, but it convinced me. My early posts here were about trying to get that site ranked. The flash movie was embedded in the center of the page- it wasn't even a full flash page.

A friend who wanted a project to test his skills on built it for me and it was pretty cool but very few ever saw it due to the lack of ranking. I pulled the flash and replaced it with a smaller image and about 100 words of text.

(FYI- the keywords weren't highly competitive ones, but we did achieve and maintain a #1 position that we still have now.)