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WorldWideWebSize.com can no longer estimate indexed web size after Google blocks automated data retrieval
A site that has tracked the size of the indexed web for years reports it can no longer calculate its estimates because Google stopped providing accessible search count data as of January 15, 2025.
The methodology depended on daily automated queries to Google, Bing, and Yahoo to extrapolate index sizes from word frequency data. With Google data cut off, the primary estimate of indexed web size is frozen at its last recorded figure of 3.98 billion pages, and the long-running longitudinal dataset has gone dark.
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The Indexed Web was last estimated at 3.98 billion pages on January 15, 2025, before data collection stopped.
The site's method sent 50 words daily to search engines and extrapolated total index size from reported document counts using a DMOZ-derived background corpus of over 1 million pages.
Yahoo and Ask had already been dropped from measurement because they stopped showing total result counts, leaving the methodology increasingly dependent on Google and Bing.
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