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The online world is a very huge place and according to Google they knew about it a long time ago. The first Google index which was released in 1998 contained around 26 million pages which increased to 1 billion in 2000. Since then, a huge increase in the number of pages has been observed by the Google.

Now the search engine giant has found that the web pages have reached a mark of 1 trillion i.e. 1,000,000,000,000.

According to Google:

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!

How did they find it out?

We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages.

According to VentureBeat, this amount is not even equal to the number of web pages in the online world. These are Google’s findings and even they can’t count the total number of pages.

Google’s official blog added:

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all!

This may be because of the fact that ‘several billion’ web pages are joining the online world each day. With so many web pages coming up every day, it is very hard to find out the exact number of pages specially when stuff like online calendars is there, where you can easily go to a certain date and every time you do so, a new page is created.

According to the blog a lot of pages indexed are similar to each other as mentioned in the above example of calendar.

We don’t index every one of those trillion pages — many of them are similar to each other,

added the Google blog.

An interesting remark given by Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj of Google’s Web Search Infrastructure Team says:

Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. 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.