In Google to Yahoo: Ours is bigger, CNET News.com reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt claims that Google’s index size is now three times as large as that of any other engine (i.e., Yahoo). At the same time, however, they are dropping the specific page count value that has graced their home page for more than a year.
Last month, Yahoo claimed to have indexed 20 billion pages, more than double what Google posted on its home page. Google disputed Yahoo’s claim at the time, and it isn’t clear whether Google is now suggesting that it has at least 60 billion pages indexed, or multiple of a lower number they attribute to Yahoo. Googleblog provides a hint that the current number is a thousand times larger than the initial BackRub (Google’s predecessor) index.
Yahoo, meanwhile, congratulated Google via John Battelle’s Searchblog on their wisdom in removing the index size from their home page… this, from the same place that boasted of their 20-million page index so recently! Tdsplanet.com blogs that the move will ultimately defuse the conflict over index size.
This entire dispute is getting pointless. Do search engines really need to claim billions of pages of duplicate content, spam, scraper content, minor query variations in dynamic pages, and every other kind of junk, purely for bragging rights? Wouldn’t this stuff be better relegated to the bit bucket? Let’s focus on more useful variables - search quality (how good are the top results), search depth (can I find obscure but unique and useful content as I go lower in the results), and data freshness (if the pages in my search were updated yesterday, will their latest content be reflected?
At the outset, this seemed like a juvenile bragging contest. Now, Schmidt goes one step further by taking the rational step of suggesting people forget about search index size, and then adding, in essence, “But, by the way, we’re three times bigger!”
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