Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
Since the early days of the Web, search engine companies have claimed bragging rights based on the number of web documents they include in their index, while simultaneously pointing out that index size is far from the only measure of a good search engine. (The company claiming the lead position usually emphasizes the former, and everyone else the latter…) Now, Yahoo has upped the ante again. In a Yahoo Search Blog article, search guru Tim Mayer announced that the total number of objects indexed by Yahoo had broken 20 billion, including over 19 billion web pages.
This appears to be twice as many web objects indexed as arch-rival Google claims. The practical implication of this feat still isn’t clear. It seems unlikely to affect competitive searches, which tend to be dominated by well-linked pages and sites that are probably in all of the major search engines. It could affect “long tail” searches, though, i.e., uncommon combinations of words that are searched infrequently and may occur on a comparatively small number of web pages.
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[…] First, the New York Times quoted Google co-founder Sergey Brin as dismissing Yahoo’s claim to have a much bigger index than Google. Brin suggested that if Yahoo had more pages indexed, it was because they were counting duplicate content that Google discarded rather than indexing. Yahoo denied the claim and stood by its original count. While it’s not odd that search engine companies might differ over how meaningful index size is for search quality, it was a bit of a surprise to see Brin jumping into the fray and attacking Yahoo. […]
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