There was a problem when proofreading this page.

DOCID: 4046925

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

pages may be any number of things, including pages with robots.txt command or tag. Unindexed pages are identifiable by what they lack: no summary, no page size, and no cached copy.

Google no longer displays the number of pages searched on its home page, but a search on [the] returns an estimated 4.8 billion pages, so that represents the minimum number of pages in the Google database (in fact, it probably is far larger). Remember, all size claims are "self validated," so take them with a grain of salt. Still, for the types of Internet research we perform, bigger really is better because we have a much better chance of finding obscure information in billions of webpages than in millions.

Customizing Google Preferences

Google offers five basic Preferences settings:

  1. Interface language: if you are more comfortable working in another language, Google can display in dozens.
  2. Search language: generally, most searchers choose to search in any language, but there are occasions when it makes sense to limit your search to one or more specific languages. Google supports 35 languages, including non-Latin languages such as Arabic, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Turkish.
  3. Filtering of pages containing explicit sexual content.
  4. Number of results: a purely individual preference, but 10 results per page is simply frustrating; Google lets you see up to 100 results per page.
  5. Results window: opens results in a new browser window.
48
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY