Google - Go Figure

One way we keep track of the growth of REBOL is to search Google and see how many hits we get. It's just a very rough metric, like weighing yourself on a scale.

When we started REBOL in 1997, if you typed REBOL into most search engines you would get between 5 to 10 links. (In fact, that was one of the reasons we picked the spelling.)

A little more than a year ago, the same Google search would result in about 150,000 links for the term "REBOL". That seemed to be a reasonable number.

During 2005 the number grew a lot, to about 775,000. That seems like a lot to me. I know of a lot of REBOL pages, but nothing like that number. But then, I know I don't have time to visit every page.

Then, today, searching REBOL on Google resulted in 1.8 million hits. Why the jump? I don't know. Maybe it's just a Google glitch. I really cannot see how the number of REBOL related pages more than doubled in just about one month. But, maybe we should consider that a good thing, right?

So, do you know why? If so, send me a feedback to let me know. I'd be curious to find out, and I will post the info here.

Update 14-Feb

It's back to normal (700K+). That 1.8M was some kind of Google glitch.

I received a number of feedbacks about the issue.

One person reported his Google returned 3.5M results for REBOL. Wow, now it's going exponential!

Another person suggested a different search engine called Teoma that he finds to be more strict, hence more accurate (it reported 70K pages for REBOL). Trying it out, I found it does a fairly good job for the few searches I ran. Check it out.

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Updated 9-Mar-2024   -   Copyright Carl Sassenrath   -   WWW.REBOL.COM   -   Edit   -   Blogger Source Code