How does the GSA / Google Mini count documents?

January 8, 2006 in Google Mini,GSA,Q&A,Spidering | Comments (0)

The Google Mini has a document limit of 100,000 documents, the Google Search Appliance between 500,000 and 2 million, although you can put several GSA’s together so you can raise that up higher.

Each ‘document’ is a page or file which has a unique address, so

d:\Project Weevils\documents\Squared burrows.doc
http://intranet/
http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk/index.php?article=5435345
and http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk/index.php?article=2947

are all documents. To a developer, the last two URLs may look like the same page, showing different content, to the GSA, that doesn’t matter – they are unique URLs, so they are different documents and will be counted separately.

So, with the Mini you get to index 100,000 individual addresses. If you have a dynamic site which shows all it’s content via variables on one address, then each page served dynamically on a different variable is counted as a separate document.

A problem with this is that if you are using multiple variables in your URLs and your page / CMS can show the same content under different URLs, you can have the same content spidered several times under different addresses – this is one variety of ‘spider trap.’ If this might happen to your site, you should look at trying to exclude it happening by giving a spiderable path to one set of the content and ignoring others using regular expressions. I’ll try to write more on that soon.

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