Yahoo and Google Argue Over Search Index size

It seems that Yahoo and Google have different views as to which has the bigger search index. A post on the Yahoo Search blog announced that Yahoo’s index had grown to 19.2 Billion web documents. The New York Times quoted Sergey Brin of Google as saying : “The comprehensiveness of any search engine should be measured by real Web pages that can be returned in response to real search queries and verified to be unique,”. In the same article, he was quoted as saying that: “We [Google] report the total index size of Google based on this approach.” Google’s webpage count currently stands at 8,168,684,336 web pages

A brief study at the US National Centre for Supercomputing Application put the claims to the test. The study was based on approximating the sizes of the indices. But it does express doubt over Yahoo’s claims.

With hundreds of thousands of domains and websites being deleted globally each day and hundreds of thousands of new domains and websites being created, it would only be possible to give an approximation as to the size of the web.

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Written by John McCormac on August 16th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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