In a news release today, Google releases new numbers for the number of pages it can search. Looks like Google has overcome its 4-byte DocID problem and happily doubled its index:

You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It’s a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you’re looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages.

The article also warns that “comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine.” Relevance, in fact, is even more important–and the latest reports from web designers show that Google pagerank is being slowly augmented with other techniques to supplement that aging, hacked protocol. More and more, it’s not about the number of links, but the quality of your content and markup.