We’ve all seen the “my dad is bigger and can beat up your dad” playground antics of search engines competing over size. The first salvo occurred when Yahoo innuendo it had indexed over 20 million pages. John Battelle talked with google about and they were baffled by this new number (via battellemedia.com), but that’s all old news.
Google who really has been acting like a petulant teenager this year, announced yesterday that their index is 3 times larger than everyone else’s, oh and you’re just going to have to trust us, because we’ve removed the counter from our homepage. So lets give Google a few quick tests to see how things work out.
search for the term [the] 9.2 billion results
ok great but there are all sorts of pages that don’t have the word [the] on it for example what about flash pages. Well that’s where it gets pretty simple we’ll just do a nice little negative search for all of the pages that don’t have the word [-the] and we end up with 1.3 billion pages which gives us about 10.5 billion pages. Not highly scientific but a good estimate, but looking at google’s recent explanation you’ll notice this sentance:
To see for yourself, try searching for something very specific
Clearly [the] and [-the] don’t meet this criteria, so lets search for something very specific like [triskadecahedron lycanthropy]. Well that certainly is specific, in fact it’s so specific there are zero results. So if none of the documents contain those terms, logically all of the documents are in the opposite set, so lets look for [-triskadecahedron -lycanthropy] and we get 9.58 billion results. Now of course when you work with multiple terms sometimes things get a little funny so lets try it with quotes [-"triskadecahedron lycanthropy"] nope still 9.58 billion results.
While it’s quite vogue to pick on google nowadays, lets look at the exact same searches on yahoo
Yahoo [the] 10.9 billion results
Yahoo [-the] 0 results
Yahoo [triskadecahedron lycanthropy] 0 results
Yahoo [-triskadecahedron -lycanthropy] 0 results
Yahoo [-"triskadecahedron lycanthropy"] 0 results
Clearly Yahoo is doing some background slight of hand to hide things. So we have Yahoo with it’s estimated 20 billion pages indexed with at least 10.9 billion pages with words on them, and we have Google with 10.5 billion pages. Does Yahoo win, does Google win, or does it really not even matter. Here’s a nice little story to put things in perspective.
When we were renovating my house I was making regular trips to Home Depot. At the time my spare tire was located in the trunk, which made it harder to carry things. I got in the habit of taking the spare out and leaving it in the garage. Eventually I misplaced the wingnut that held the tire in place. It turns out it was a 14mm wing nut and difficult to find in the US. I brought the bolt into Home Depot and couldn’t find it, I also tried Lowes and found nothing. I went to teeny-tiny Henry’s Ace Hardware store, walked in and handed an elderly gentleman my bolt, he went into the back room and promptly emerged with a 14mm wing nut, in less than 90 seconds, clearly size isn’t always the most important factor.
It’s like Danny Sullivan says having a bigger haystack doesn’t help if you still can’t find the needle (via clickz).
Related Documents
Google Announces New Size for Index - Battelle media
Google, No Really Ours is the Biggest - Threadwatch
Google Touts size of it’s Index - CNet
Roundup of Google Size Announcement - Search Engine Watch
Google Our Search is Bigger than your search - Silicon.com
Google takes down boast about size of index - USA Today
Hat Tip to Matt Cutts for showing us how to write search queries properly.
Categories:( google | yahoo | search.engine | search.engine.size)
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