A while back, Google surpassed the 8 billion mark, and Gigablast Broke 1k the other day. John Battellle reported; Exalead, a company that powers AOL France's search (I was introduced to its founder by Alta Vista founder Louis Monier - yup, he's French) announced today that its stand alone search engine has surpassed the 1-billion-pages-indexed mark. (The engine launched in October)." Louis Monier was on the panel at SES on the search memories session, you can see his picture there, smart, visionary and funny guy.
Gary Price reports that Exalead's Paris-based CEO, Francois Bourdoncle, said "that the company plans to have a two billion page web index online in the near future. He also said that his company is about just ready to introduce a desktop search tool."
And if you want to see, for fun, how I got acquainted with Exalead, I made a short (50 second) QuickTime Movie file. The download size is 2.4MB, I saved it as a zip file here.