I made a photojournal of a hike I went on last Sunday to the Mt. Baker wilderness. Dan Crouse, his friend Sherry, and I climbed Excelsior Peak and the adjoining Excelsior Ridge, which were painted in beautiful autumn colors. I made a 360° panorama of the view at the top. The only unfortunate part of it was the drive — over 2:30 each way.
Google's index should be growing exponentially to keep up with the growing size of the web. Google's main page indicates that it searches 4,285,199,774 web pages, and this number has remained the same for the last year and seven months, since around February 8-14, 2003, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Previously, it had been growing rapidly — 1,326,920,000 on Feb. 1, 2001; 2,073,418,204 on Feb. 6, 2002; 3,083,324,652 on Feb. 8, 2003; 4,285,199,774 on Feb. 14, 2004. In other words, it had been growing at a rate of roughly 50% per year until it reached its present plateau. Extrapolating, by now it should be over 5 billion.
I bet they are suffering from a 4-byte limit with their URL identifiers. With 4 bytes, which is the natural word-size for the inexpensive ia32/x86-compatible processors they are using, they can store 32 bits, and that means 232 different values, or 4,294,967,296. They may be using some of the values for special purposes, and so haven't reached the absolute maximum, yet they are within 0.22% of the maximum. Adding another bit or byte to store more URL ID numbers would probably slow things down because it would require their CPUs to do much more work when manipulating the IDs. I suspect they have decided that they are in a engineering sweet spot and 4.285 billion URLs are enough for a while. So they won't increase the index size until they switch to using 64-bit processors, which would provide enough bits to easily manipulate 264, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, URL IDs (that's over 18.4 quintillion).
As a result of the plateau, there are an exponentially growing number "unimportant" (as measured by their PageRank) web sites that are not in Google's index. An increasing number of web site owners and web site searchers will be rather unhappy with Google because of this, and the situation might not improve for months if not years.
December 17, 2004 Update:
Google finally increased their index size in mid-November, so It was only another month after this post that things improved.
I needed to renew the registration for my pickup truck, and an emission test was required. I went to the Kirkland test station on Monday, paid the $15 fee, and failed in all four categories (CO levels and CO2 levels for cruising and idling).
I had to spend at least $150 for repairs to receive a waiver, so I took it to Woodinville Import Auto Repair, which also does work on domestic vehicles. My dad had a positive experience with them, and they were listed as having an “Ecology Specialist” by the information given to me from the testing station. The repair shop charged me $280 for two and a half hours of labor and a new oxygen sensor. The oxygen sensor was $70, which seemed a bit high, considering I found it for half that on-line.
I had the pickup retested on Wednesday (for free) and it failed again. It passed the idle tests, but not the cruise. They gave me a waiver, so at least I can register it. Unfortunately, they said I would need to fix it or spend at least another $150 trying when I next registered it and needed emissions testing, in two years. I feel like I've already spent nearly $300, so I should get that waiver for free. I'm all for saving the environment, but I think it's ironic that I've only driven my vehicle for a few hundred miles in the last two years, so the amount of damage it has done to the ecology probably wouldn't buy a bale of hay.
Cruise control is nice, but I wish it worked better. When I drive down the road, there is a speed limit, and I would like to prevent my car from exceeding it (perhaps by no more than some small amount, say 5 mph), to ensure I am not ticketed. I imagine a set of buttons for common speeds, such as 25, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, and 70. When I select one of them, the vehicle cannot go beyond that speed no matter how forcefully I depress the accelerator pedal. A large button labeled infinity (or clear) would unencumber the maximum speed. To fully implement such a feature, the vehicle's electronics would need a way to activate the brakes so that it could be (gently) slowed down to the maximum when traveling downhill. (My Ford Ranger 1988 pickup doesn't do this, but perhaps other vehicles do.)
I made a high-powered magnetic wand for Noelle. Pictures and details are available.
I made a photojournal of my work on the trailer at the family apple farm, where I was last week.