Google has used its finances since going public to acquire many innovative startups – ranging from video site YouTube, photo-sharing service Picasa and also the core of its controversial Google Earth mapping service. It also has nurtured some homegrown consumer favourites that include social networking site, Orkut and e-mail service Gmail.

The number of searches handled by the Internet giant has gone up astronomically. Google reported it handled in 1998 close to 10,000 searches a day. That number shot up to 500,000 a day in a yaer’s time. Google does not share the numbers widely, but according to research group comScore estimate, Google hosted around 235 million searches a day this July to give some idea of their reach.

There is another way to gauge Google’s popularity and growth. In 1998 the first Google index had nearly 26 million Web pages, whereas in July, a Google search engineer happened to dig out how many unique URLs it searches to find content online: the number was a whopping 1 trillion. At this rate, a ‘googol’ worth of pages (1 followed by 100 zeros) can just be a few years away.