Sunday, July 27, 2008

Google's 1 trillionth Index

Google marked another milestone in search engine history on last Friday. Two of it's Web Infrastructure Team engineers claimed that they've realized that the Google's spider finally crawled the trillionth web page. Indexing about 26 million pages in 1998, 1 billion pages in 2000, Google's back-end grew to something like 8 billion indexes by 2006. However, it didn't take that long for it to reach the 1 trillion mark.

This can mean many things, and one could wonder whether Google just made up this story. But, however, considering websites that dynamically generate pages, ever increasing blog-o-sphere, and several other feed publishing sites are continuing to increase even at this very moment. As the two engineers from Google adds the size does matter, but it depends on how you define it. Thus, if not all those 1,000,000,000,000 are useful to you that would not mean there are that many indexes.

Apparently, the trillionth page had just one word according to this article. And, that might be a good reason to accept the fact that the trillion might be still on the way. Thomas Claburn sees this as a mere trait to stay in the lead of it's competition. This is in fact evident in the post made by the Google's engineers as they add that the most significant achievement is them being certain that they have the most comprehensive index.

To me, Google suffices even it has a trillion pages indexed or whatever, as long as it returns results that I expect for my search. So far I should say that it does a good job relatively, and is one of the good search engines out there.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Microsoft Funds ASF

It finally happened I should say... Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it would be contributing $100K to the Apache Software Foundation. John Fontana also adds that Microsoft even made there first code contribution to the ASF, which is a remarkable achievement in terms of Open Source and Proprietary software collaboration.

Well if you can't imagine this read Paul's post which relates a number of interesting articles which better explains the move. I was lucky to witness the Tech.Ed presentation made by Jonathan Marsh which was probably one of the greatest achievements Open Source has ever made within the MS domain, which described the power of the WSO2's stack of software projects that enables an unmatched SOA experience.

Just a bit more than 1 1/2 months from that day, I'm wondering did WSO2 influence Microsoft to march its way towards the ASF? Well, what ever the reason behind the choice made by Microsoft, it is good news for everybody. Microsoft even has made other initiatives in making software free such as codeplex, live, and dreamspark. We believe that other giants in the industry will also mark their presence in the Open Source arena in days to come.