I have been using Google for six years and 10 months, as I started using them two months after they went beta. It was such a refreshing alternative to typical search engines back then.

At first, I thought its Spartan interface was a mistake and it was a site still under construction. The typical search engines back then -- Yahoo, Alta Vista and Northern Lights -- had home pages so packed you could barely find the search engine box.

That interface has remained essentially unchanged to this very day. In fact, it has grown by less than 50 words in seven years. Most people don't realize that Google scrutinizes carefully every single letter on their home page before it is added.

The other major appeal they had is that you could get 100 results all at once when you searched a term (keyword). This was a major benefit as nearly all of us back in 1998 had dial-up connections and it would take so long for that search results page to come up, most of us could not tolerate searching beyond two or three pages for a term, which is a measly 20-30 results.

With today's high-speed connections, it's not as much of a problem, but back then it was a big deal.

Google's latest issue is the size of their search index. They state it is 1,000 times larger than it was when it first started. Recently, Yahoo claimed it had a larger index, but Google retorted that Yahoo's search engine had many duplicates that artificially inflated their count.

Now they have a new page to show you how to prove to yourself that they have a larger index.