How Big is Google’s Index?
Since Google has stopped exposing the size of their indexed web documents on their homepage, it seems that different web users have been performing searches to try and figure out Google’s size.
Some searches used to be “* *”, but according to Philipp, that search does not work anymore.
Google Blogoscoped is trying to figure out the optimal search terms for gauging the size of Google’s index.
Please lend Philipp your tips 
a search for “to be” | -”to be” returns about 15,450,000,000 results at this time (theoretically, this search query – other than being a neat Shakespeare quote! – ought to return every page Google indexed, but practically this doesn’t seem to be the case, as the number is relatively low). The weird search query *-”a displays a page count of 17,960,000,000. What other tactics yield high or even higher page counts on Google.com?
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