In a bid to outdo competitors Yahoo and MSN Search, search engine specialist Google Inc has said that it has increased its index 1000 fold from the launch of the original number of pages searched. This they say making it three times greater than the search index offered by any other engine. We maintain that size isn't all that matters and that Google results remain the best in the business even with the 'catchup' efforts of Yahoo! and MSN.
However, the company added that it would stop mentioning the total number of Web pages available or searched through and would urge readers to decide for themselves which engine – Yahoo or Google – throws up the most relevant results by searching for difficult to find keywords.
“We believe that we have an index that is three times larger (without counting duplicate pages). We are asking our readers to test for themselves,” said Google spokesperson Marissa Mayer. The company is celebrating its seventh anniversary this September.
Earlier, Google had claimed to search 8 billion pages. To be one up, Yahoo, in August, went to town that its search database covered 19.2 billion Web pages. Google rebutted this claim with the contention that its best experts and a number of other independent experts could not replicate this and so Yahoo's assertion smacked of pumped up figures.
But this time round, Mayers refused to put a number to the revised search database. “Absolute numbers are no longer useful,” she said.
Yahoo, which came about in 1994, was the king of Web search, till Google came along in 1998 and started getting more eyeballs. Since then, Yahoo and Google have been in a race to provide more features and greater database for search.
Commenting on Google's latest stance, a statement released by Yahoo said, “We congratulate Google on removing the index size number from its home page and recognizing that it is a meaningless number. As we've said in the past, what matters is that consumers find what they are looking for, and we invite Google users to compare their results to Yahoo Search.” However, the results seemed to vary from one search strings to another.
Leaving the size race to the users, Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, said the relevance of the search was more important than the number of pages a keyword threw up. “Users will be the best judges of which search engine is the most appropriate. The fact that you have picked up more content in a particular search result doesn't mean you have found better information. It just means you have found more pages,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ken Moss, general manager of MSN Search felt the size war should give way to a quality war. “This discussion should turn to overall search engine quality... It needs to be a measure of how often our customers get their answers,” he wrote on his blog.
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Q: How does one remove or request a review of a web site or domain name penalty in the Google search index?
