Mountain View, California-based Google recently recorded over one trillion unique URLs on the Web. Google search engineers, who are witnessing the Web rapidly growing by many billion unique pages every day, were awed by this milestone, stated company officials in a blog post.

Along with announcing this discovery, the search giant also took the opportunity to promote the magnitude and scope of its index.

When Google opened for business in the year 1998, it had 26 million unique URLs. A couple of years later, the count had reached 1 billion. In 2005, it claimed of having over massive 8 billion Web pages in its index, at least until it excluded the index count off its main page. And today, its measure of the Web is amazingly 1 trillion Web pages. This has indeed been a successful journey for Google.

Software engineers from Google’s Web Search Infrastructure team, Nissan Hajaj and Jesse Alpert admitted that the company is not aware of the total number of pages on the World Wide Web as they don’t have enough time to look at them all.

They said that the number of pages over the Web is infinite, but asserted being proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and that the goal has always been to index the entire world’s data. Moreover, Google keeps downloading the web continuously to collect updated page information, thus re-processing the entire web-link graph a number of times per day. They referred the graph of one trillion unique URLs as being similar to a map that comprises of one trillion intersections.

Google had not made any public pronouncements regarding the size of its index since a very long time. Those days of index-size envy came to an end as soon as it became clear that majority of people hardly scan over two pages of Web results.