Google is normally uber-secretive about the size of its search indexes, but the official Google blog did drop a fascinating hint this week: Google is now indexing more than one trillion unique URLs. Of course, that makes the core database the company stores even larger:

This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

All of which is good reason to be grateful that Google's doing it, so you don't have to. [The Official Google Blog]

The ABC's excellent iView service is clearly filling a need for Australians keen to access TV on their own schedule. In the first 24 hours following its launch, the service attracted 58,000 visitors, who downloaded 2.3 terabytes of content. Mind you, that amounts to just under 50MB each, which suggests that lots of people aren't doing much more than testing the service. But it's still a great start.

The Australian addiction to property investment is at least partly fuelled by the belief that while growth rates may vary, the value of a house will never go down. However, as economist Nigel Stapledon points out, while this may have been true since the mid-1960s, there have been points in history where the value of houses in Australia have declined, and current economic woes have seen property prices plummet overseas:

Of course that does not necessarily mean Australian house prices will fall now, but there is no law of nature that says they cannot fall.

None of that's an argument against owning (as opposed) to renting your own house, but it's something to bear in mind if you're thinking about a longer-term investment strategy.
Debunking housing myths [Herald Sun]

According to Sensis' latest e-Business Report, just 10% of Australians have a phone with email access incorporated. (Whether that's because the data plans for them are so expensive is another matter.) Those of us who do have them seem to like them: six out of ten mobile email users never switch their device off, while roughly a fifth of us de-activate them at weekends to get some proper downtime. Doubtless these figures will be used at some point in the near future to argue that the BlackBerry has turned us all into work slaves -- though, as Gina argued recently, such discussions never point out the productivity gains that can come with better access to work resources.

It's a familiar problem: you spot an item you want in an online store, and then discover that it won't deliver to a non-US address or without a US credit card. WorldPurchases offers itself as an intermediary, allowing you to order from multiple US retailers. Pretty much every major online store is covered (though sadly no eBay). The service charge is 5% of your total order and shipping from the US, but that still might work out cheaper than buying locally for some items (especially if you take advantage of services like Amazon's Super Saver Shipping to minimise postage). If you've used WorldPurchases or a similar service, let us know how it went in the comments. (Thanks Tony!) [WorldPurchases]

In Office 2007, Word automatically defaults to full print preview mode, which is fine if you're a design obsessive but a big waste of screen real estate if you just want to get some words written. Fortunately, you can make Word default to draft view, though it's a very obscure option. (Proving the point: while Microsoft notes how to fix this in its online support site, somewhat remarkably this information isn't included in Word 2007's own online help.)
To make Draft the default view, select Word Options from the main Office menu (or just type Alt-T then O), and scroll down to the General section. Tick 'Allow opening a document in Draft view' (despite the confusing phrasing, this actually affects new documents as well). In my experience, you need to exit and relaunch Word to make the setting stick. To really maximise your available screen real estate, you can also minimise the Ribbon (an option under the nearly invisible 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar' downward arrow button to the right of the Office button).

Standalone Outlook users suffer a little when it comes to getting their calendars and contacts into the cloud. Google offers a synchronisation tool for its Calendar, but the software is (at least in my experience) far too unstable to use. Now Microsoft itself has entered the fray, launching a beta version of release 12.1 of its Outlook Office Connector, which lets you sync information from Outlook into Live (Hotmail). Microsoft has offered this service before, but used to charge for it; now it's on offer for free. Beta is very much the word; we had trouble getting anything to sync at all. If you've had more success, let us know your experiences in the comments. [Microsoft via Official Outlook Team Blog]

ABC iView (called Playback during its beta period) has now been opened up to all Australian Internet users, offering access to a fair chunk of the national broadcaster's output on full-screen streaming video across six channels. Unlike the Windows-only ABC Shop Download, the site is accessible on any browser supporting Flash (so Windows, Mac and Linux users all have options). There's plenty to keep you entertained: a rough calculation suggests there's already about 80 hours of programming on the service, the news channel will be updated on a daily basis, and the ABC has promised additional channels in the future. iView is free to access (via an Australian connection; the service is blocked overseas). As with all streaming media, you'll need to keep an eye on your download cap if you use the service extensively -- unless you're with iiNet, which is excluding iView from its quota.

Following a restricted beta which began last December, Google has made its Wikipedia competitor Knol open for general use. While Knol borrows the general concept of "anyone can contribute" common to most wiki projects, it has a slight twist, as Google's software engineers explain:

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knol is free to use, requires a Google account to sign in. [Knol via Official Google Blog]

It's been years since we looked at a print edition of the Yellow Pages, but even the online version of the venerable business directory doesn't often attract our attention. Now the whole project has become more useful for a very simple reason: Sensis (the Telstra division that produces the Yellow Pages) has finally allowed Google's robots to index Yellow Pages content, meaning that everyone's favourite search engine now has access to Australian businesses which might otherwise never appear in online results. (The fact that it was ever blocked is frankly one of the weirdest Internet strategies imaginable, but that's another story.)
We're a tad sceptical that being in a Yellow Pages listing will result in businesses getting more visibility in Google search results, as Sensis claims (based on its existing high traffic). Nonetheless, knowing that non-tech-savvy businesses will now appear in search results is very useful. (Note: Existing Telstra mobile customers might want to stick with the Yellow site when on the road, if only because it's free to access on many Next G plans.)