Yahoo!
completed
an index upgrade that gives it bragging rights to the relatively meaningless measurement of "largest index." Yahoo!
claims to index 20-billion objects (pages and images), compared to Google's 11.3-billion objects. It breaks down to
Yahoo! able to serve more than twice as many Web-page results.
Of course, with databases of this size, quality and relevance are far more important than yet more quantity.
Obviously, both engines cover the basics, the not-so-basics, the obscure, and a damn long tail beoynd the obscure. I'd
be much more interested in an announcement from one of them that it had found a foolproof way to detect and eliminate
spoofing and misdirection of all sorts. Will I ever see Yahoo!'s 18-billionth page? Who knows, and I certainly wasn't
missing it. The hidden Web is what I'm missing—the many billions of pages secluded behind firewalls of barious kinds,
like the elusive dark matter of the universe.
Let's remember, too, that most searchers never get beyond the first ten results. That puts the 20-billion pages in a
somewhat diminished perspective.
[Thanks to Daniel Terdiman]
Yahoo! Upgrades Indexes; Claims 20-billion Objects
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Not true...It also means that you will get your top 10 results for a far greater number of queries?
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jigs
3. I agree. Quanity !== Quality. Having the largest database in the world doesn't mean you have the best search engine. It comes down to the quality of your search results and how effective the keywords are in those results.
Google still ranks the higher sites that have a higher PR while yahoo I can get ranked pretty easily and not have a lot of traffic going to those pages. I use Google because it gives me the higher valued pages.
4. The more pages that are indexed, the options Yahoo has to display in their search results. Hopefully some of those pages are useful to searchers.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Neil Patel
5. You know, as much as I love blogs, they can (and do) wreak havoc with search results. I would really like to be able to choose if my search includes blogs or not. Indexing all of them doesn't really impress me.
I wonder how many of those 20 billion objects are spam blog pages on blogspot.
6. i agree with the quality over quantity statment
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by College Student
7. As someone who is involved in search engine optimisation as well as a heavy user of search engines it amazes me as to how easy it is to perform a search of say 3 [meaningful when strung together] words and not get a single result back, providing you use the quotation marks. That indicates to me that the engines in general are not going deep enough especially with blogs. I think quantity is important when it means locating the obscure that you would otherwise not find eleswhere.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Carl Spencer
1. Quote:
"Let’s remember, too, that most searchers never get beyond the first ten results. thast puts the 20-billion pages in a somewhat diminished perspective."
Not entirely true - most of the indexed pages are included in the results in some other way - for examople pointing (linking) to the top 10 results. So they are needed in the procsess of generating results of your query, even if they are not shown.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Hubert