What IS the size of the Googlesphere

What is the real size of the Googlesphere?

I occasionaly run a small test to determine the size of the Googlesphere (number of web pages that Google has crawled and indexed). It's a good test, but sometimes the results are all over the map. I ran the test three times today and got three wildly differing results: 9.7 billion, 11.2 billion, and just now I got 18.1 billion.

Why the disparity?

My understanding is that there are multiple copies or mirrors of the database that Google builds to index the web pages that it has crawled and that these copies are frequently not synchronized.

To answer the headline question, I suspect the answer is 18.1 billion web pages.

-- Jack Krupansky