OAKLAND, Calif. — In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than one billion web pages. The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger. Today, it’s somewhere between 500 billion and 600 billion web pages, according to estimates. “If people are on a search engine with a smaller index, they’re not always going to get the results they want. And then they go to Google and stay at Google,” said Matt Wells, who started Gigablast, a search engine with an index of around five billion web pages, about 20 years ago.

Source: New York Times December 14, 2020 09:56 UTC