Thanks to nicedreams on the forums for this piece of speculation...
"A rumour is spreading like the plague over the infinite paths of the Internet: Google has reached overbooking. The most popular creature in the virtual universe has space problems, or, more precisely, it could have them in the future. In fact, is seems that the most popular search engine in the world is about to reach the limit of its capacity of listed pages: 4,294,967,296. A numeric problem that is mainly due to a calculation error.
In Google’s giant database, each link can occupy the space of only 4 bytes. In other words, even though the home page of the system has counted something like three million web pages, it is probable that the engine is about to run out. Or, if they do not change their system of listing links, the Internet will continue to grow and expand behind Google’s back, but the new sites that will be created will be left out while its database will be full of an enormous quantity of obsolete pages that will crowd the pages of search results.
The analysts arrived at this conclusion by studying the recent “strange behaviour of the system” during the last renewal of its “contents.” In fact, more or less once a month, Google reorders its listed pages. During this process, the system calculates the so-called PageRank of each page, based on the number of visits received and therefore, based on order of importance. It then incorporates the new pages found into its list of available web sites, periodically modifying the search results. This process of updating is called Google Dance in jargon and lasts approximately four days. However, during the last Google Dance many pages changed their position in the classification in an unexplainable way. This, together with other anomalous events has created unrest among users.
Since the first Google became a reality on the Internet in 1997, this search system has evolved and become, without a doubt, the most powerful instrument on the Internet. Not only have its creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page become multimillionaires, but they have also become two of the greatest heroes of the virtual community whose dominion extends all around the world, thanks in particular to their list of links. In a certain sense, Google is the spine of the Internet. And whatever problem afflicts its working can influence the growth of the very same Internet. But what can they do to continue to efficiently list a sea of pages that continue to multiply exorbitantly?"
View: Article @ GSM box
"A rumour is spreading like the plague over the infinite paths of the Internet: Google has reached overbooking. The most popular creature in the virtual universe has space problems, or, more precisely, it could have them in the future. In fact, is seems that the most popular search engine in the world is about to reach the limit of its capacity of listed pages: 4,294,967,296. A numeric problem that is mainly due to a calculation error.
In Google’s giant database, each link can occupy the space of only 4 bytes. In other words, even though the home page of the system has counted something like three million web pages, it is probable that the engine is about to run out. Or, if they do not change their system of listing links, the Internet will continue to grow and expand behind Google’s back, but the new sites that will be created will be left out while its database will be full of an enormous quantity of obsolete pages that will crowd the pages of search results.
The analysts arrived at this conclusion by studying the recent “strange behaviour of the system” during the last renewal of its “contents.” In fact, more or less once a month, Google reorders its listed pages. During this process, the system calculates the so-called PageRank of each page, based on the number of visits received and therefore, based on order of importance. It then incorporates the new pages found into its list of available web sites, periodically modifying the search results. This process of updating is called Google Dance in jargon and lasts approximately four days. However, during the last Google Dance many pages changed their position in the classification in an unexplainable way. This, together with other anomalous events has created unrest among users.
Since the first Google became a reality on the Internet in 1997, this search system has evolved and become, without a doubt, the most powerful instrument on the Internet. Not only have its creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page become multimillionaires, but they have also become two of the greatest heroes of the virtual community whose dominion extends all around the world, thanks in particular to their list of links. In a certain sense, Google is the spine of the Internet. And whatever problem afflicts its working can influence the growth of the very same Internet. But what can they do to continue to efficiently list a sea of pages that continue to multiply exorbitantly?"
View: Article @ GSM box
AdBlock
"AdBlock allows the user to specify a number of filters, which removes unwanted images based on their address. Filters are specified using the wildcard character (*) or regular expressions. Thus, it's possible to control in some detail what is displayed. Upon loading a page, AdBlock will scan through it and remove or hide the elements that matches the filters entered by the user. It doesn't prevent content from being downloaded, merely from being displayed. It's capable of removing both images and Flash animations."
The fact that it still downloads them makes ya feel a little less guilty :)
View: AdblockAutoscroll
"AutoScroll is an addon for Firebird that emulates the autoscrolling functionality of Internet Explorer. For those unfamiliar with this, when you middle click on a page (typically by clicking a mouse wheel button) you can then move the mouse up and down to have the page scroll by you without further mouse movements."
An invaluable feature.
View: AutoscrollLiveHTTPHeaders
"This developer oriented extension is to add information about the HTTP headers. More information on the project homepage."
Not invaluable, but a cool and useful tool for web gurus.
View: LiveHTTPHeadersPopup ALT Attribute
"This extension displays the alt property of images as a tooltip, like Internet Explorer and Netscape 4.x does. "
View: Popup ALT AttributeMycroft
"This is a very powerful collection of extensions that allow you to add search engines to the Search bar in Firebird. To install a new search engine, go to the Download page and enter the Site Name (e.g. altavista, dictionary, etc.) and press Search. A list of matches should appear. Click on the one you want and that search engine should now be added to the list of available search engines in the Firebird Search bar!"
This is just super- a collection of adins that add extra search options to the search box in the top right.
View: MycroftUser Agent Switcher
"This extension adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed to provide functionality similar to the "Browser Identification" feature of Opera."
Very very useful, allowing you to view sites deemed good enough only for IE :D.
View: User Agent SwitcherWeb Developer
"The Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firebird adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools." (ed - view his site for the full list- there are loads of things.)
One of my favorite tools, enabling a plethora of extra Web Developer functions.
View: Web DeveloperWell - thats my favorite few. Hope you get as much fun out of them as i have!
And regarding that FUD, well yeah, pretty much possible, because there is no source reference and who actually knows how Google works? Definitely not that GSMBox moron. And why didn't other sites mention such an issue? If this is such an issue, it would have been on /. already. And how do you fit an URL, website description and excerpt into 4 bytes anyhow? And do you really think the Google guys would have been so stupid and use 32bit identifiers? No way!
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=80c923423587129db56909185d94e504&act=ST&f=8&t=85526&st=30
Either way, the general concensus is that Dominic was a step backwards of sorts.... and then all kinda of rumors start to fly.
WebmasterWorld is probably the most reliable place for Google happenings ... even a Google employee participates (obviously, in a very general, non-specific manner.. but he's there)..... and I dont recall seeing anything about a space issue there... but there's no denying Dominic was "funky".
Thanks,
Ferret !
Googles indexing system will be far more flexible than that - this isn't the 1960's!!!
my guess, is that this was all forged by one of the competitors of google, to create a hysteria among people who don't know any better, and stop using google... but that could be my paranoid mind working
I was wondering how the two guys that made Google are multi-millionaires. I mean, they don't get paid for any ads so... I just can't think of the way they make so much money at the moment, someone enlighten me
We have one at my University.
And back to the guy who asked the inital question about money.
Investors, multi-million dollar partnerships with over130+ companies... adwords, sponsored listings (which is a minimum of $5k/month), servers, etc etc etc.
And to think... one of the most powerful websites on earth, and it's still a private company.
These are some smart cookies.... if ya always though google was just a web search look further:
Froogle
Google Answers
Google Catalogs
Google Voice Search - cool idea
Google Web API - limitless possiblities of uses, kudos to Google for this one
more RAM does not help to problem since it's the problem on the structure of the database
if they find another database system which support 64-bit or even 128-bit, it can support 18446744073709551615 records or 2^128 records (calculate it yourself
however, the storage problem will be concerned
Yahoo! uses Google!
:lol:
I like google...search engines as a rule suck but google is the least sucky of all of them...
All they need is more RAM, RAM sovles everything
Give Alltheweb a try.
Personally I think its an invasion of privacy for them to be doing that anyways even if people post in public forums. Most people intend their post for that specific group and no where else. Most people don't intend or care to have their post still shown 10 or 20 years later where future employers could read and judge you based on that.
I personnaly think that the archiving of every news is one of the best feature of google (in fact Google didn't start this archiving... they just bought dejanews that had been archiving for many years before and make it much better!). You must see the news as a database of knowledge... if you want something private... send email!
-lieb39
That's 2^32 = 4294967296, the max number that a 32bit integer can hold, SUPPOSING google is using the 32bit integer as a page's reference (inde
All About Google (Thanks to Mohamed_E at WebmasterWorld)
Good luck understanding it.
I can't imagine anyone needing more than a 4,294,967,296 web page database for a search engine.
But, yes there have been some funky happenings there (completely unrelated to this space-issue). Anti-spam techniques ceased to work with Dominic (meaning quite a few ppl that spammed to get their site atop the list, got just that, their sites atop the listings).
People that pay close attention to the changes in updates agree to a point that the last update reduced overall search relavancy.
Overall, the latest update was viewed by many as a negative, and possibly a step backwards....... why, no one knows.
Esmeralda @ Webmasterworld
Personally, I can't break away from Dogpile which is a metasearch engine. Searches thru all of the search engines at once. There are others too. But it always seems a different engine is pointing towards the type of results I'm looking for. Sometimes google, sometimes yahoo etc.
This is incorrect. PageRank is not determined by visits or popularity, although it gauges it. PageRank measures a page's importance according to Google and it calculates this based on link popularity. The bigger/more popular sites that link to you, the higher your PageRank is. And vice-versa ...
Any way HOW COME NO ONE HAD THE IDEA TO ASK GOOGLE IF THEY ARE GOING TO DIE. SOME PEOPLE PROBABLY THINK THAT THEY ARE GOING TO REPLY THAT EVERYTHING IS FINE. I MEAN NOT MUCH WILL HAPPEN IF HUMANS FIND OUT.
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