Google Search Advocate Speaks Out on the Difficulties of Crawling the Entire Internet

The main purpose of Google’s search engine is to make it so that people can find anything that their heart desires on the internet, and it does this by crawling through every single inch of the interne that it can get to and listing all of the URLs that it finds. A recent Reddit comment spoke about the frustration that can occur when using SEO tools because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up failing to find all of the relevant links for a particular site.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that John Mueller, a search advocate at Google, recently talked about how it is more or less impossible to find every single URL on the web. Simply put, the web is just too large of a place to make this possible, and Mueller also mentioned that there is an infinite number of unique URLs across the internet with all things having been considered and taken into account.

There are also physical limitations that prevent each and every URL from being crawled. Since the number of URLs is potentially infinite, there isn’t a database in the world that can store each and every one of them. Crawlers also need a lot of resources if they are to find such a large quantity of URLs, and this could potentially be costly for site owners as well because they would have to start spending a lot more on things like SEO.

A vast chunk of the internet is also full of junk and useless information that no one is going to be all that interested in. Web crawlers might waste a lot of resources trying to acquire these URLs that no one particularly wants in the first place, so they often make judgment calls and try to focus on pages that might have a high degree of relevance. These limitations are what make it impossible to crawl the entirety of the internet, useful though that might be for some.

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