Size of the Googlesphere: 0.968E-90 googols -- it's shrinking!

Google no longer reports the number of documents that it has crawled and indexed on it's opening screen. But you can deduce the approximate number using some tricks.

As of today, the number of documents in the Googlesphere is 9,680,000,000 or 9.68 billion. That's down 30,000,000 documents since a week ago (9,710,000,000 or 9.71 billion on 1/22/06).

The Googlesphere is shrinking! Well, maybe not. It's probably simply a statistical anomoly. Besides, these numbers are only approximations on the part of Google anyway.

BTW, that's 0.968E-90 googols (1 googal is 1.0E+100). The beavers at Google have a very long way to go to live up to their name. Or maybe they should blame bloggers for not generating new documents at a fast-enough pace.

-- Jack Krupansky