Google to Yahoo: Ours is bigger

In the latest round of the search-index size contest, Google unveiled an updated index it said is more than three times larger than that of any of its search engine competitors.

"We're celebrating our seventh birthday...We had a pretty strong year," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with CNET News.com, as he listed the launch of new products including Google Talk, Google Earth, Google Video and Google Desktop Search. "And we've sort of been struggling here with respect to the index. It has always been much larger than the others."

"We're announcing tonight that in terms of unduplicated pages our index is now three times larger than any other search engine," he said, without saying how many pages are in the index.

Google will stop providing on its search page a quantity of pages indexed, which previously was listed as 8 billion, "because people don't necessarily agree on how to count it," Schmidt said.

In addition, the company will encourage users to test out the search engines using a specialized query to see which provides the most results, he said.

"We want end users to derive the number to their satisfaction. They will discover that ours is larger," he said.

In a random test, using the search terms "Joe Schmoe" and "pickles," Google returned 451 results, Yahoo returned 62 results, MSN returned 60 results and Ask Jeeves returned 54 results.

Google took exception when Yahoo last month claimed that at more than 20 billion, its index was larger than Google's.

Search Engine Watch Editor Danny Sullivan has argued that relevancy matters most, and has urged the search engines to come together to develop a uniform way to measure relevancy.

"Who's biggest really doesn't matter, as I and others have written so, so, so, so, so many times before," he wrote in a blog after Yahoo's announcement last month.

Asked to respond to Sullivan's comment that relevance trumps size, Schmidt said: "You get better relevancy and more comprehensive news with a larger index."

"We congratulate Google on removing the index size number from its home page and for recognizing it is a meaningless number," Yahoo said in a statement. "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 at http://search.yahoo.com."

Eric talks to news.com?

"...Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with CNET News.com"

I thought Google was refusing to talk to news.com for a year. Has that changed?

[Rusdude]

Yeah...

I hope that means the end to the whole Cnet-Google fiasco. I'm sick of Cnet sticking that "Google hates us" paragraph in every story.

Quality of results

Is it in this age of too much information not better to have less, but more accurate results? While I do like Google, that it finds 450 results for one search is a bit daunting.

Relevance is what's important

As we produce and store more information, relevance of results is the priority for decision makers. I think that The Mole from www.themolesite.com provides the means to search for relevant information. It would make a great addition to Google or Yahoo.

[m.afshari]

Google rocks the world!!

only GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGLE!!! happy birthday search engine!!!!!!!!!!!!

[PCCRomeo]

Google is THE search engine...

You get the most accurate results hands down. Yahoo, yea, it's okay but only the first few are actually what you're looking for. Ask Jeeves has gotten so caught up in the rat race of being the biggest that they have totally screwed up their search engine, which was at one time, in my opinion as good as Google. But Google is the best now and that's all that matters :-)

[martind]

But a bigger index will take longer to update?

Does size really matter? My company is going through a major redesign of its websites. MSN has been the first to consistently deep index the sites. One new site was only launched for a day and MSN found it and started indexing. Google is getting there but isn't very quick off the mark at the moment. Google isn't as enthusiastic as MSN when it comes to going deeper into the site (we're only talking three clicks here). Yahoo by the way has taken the longest - more than a month to find the new content and is still listing the old URL's as well.

[tgolstch]

right

I have tried comparing yahoo to google, and there is no contest, I'm sticking with google.

Google Smoogle, what's all the noise about?

When I tried your "Joe Schmoe" and "pickles" search on Google, it stated that there were 449 results but if you page to the end of the results you get this:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 181 already displayed."

So then clicked on some of the end results and I could not see where the page had anything to do with "Joe Schmoe" and "pickles".

Why there is so much hype around Google baffles me.

[mayno]

Google talking to CNET now?

I thought G won't talk to you guys until sometime in 2006. If they dropped that moratorium, that's great.

What a ridiculous thing to do in the first place. G execs need to get a grip.

MSN = Emerson Radio Corp.

Related quotes (delayed 20+ minutes)
GOOG 314.77 -0.59 (-0.19%) Google Inc
YHOO 32.31 0.13 (0.40%) Yahoo! Inc.
MSN 3.49 0.11 (3.25%) Emerson Radio Corp.

MSN = Emerson Radio Corp. and is trading at 3.49.

[b2bhandshake]

Multiplier effect

Google seems to be playing the multiplier card very well..More people search using the engine, more websites are motivated to index...and so on; the big only gets bigger.

- Mohan
http://www.offshoringmanagement.com

[kael10]

Mr. Schmidt owes his success largely to a global network of mobster fiends is what I hear from rival mafia. They say it was him that was directly responsible for the colosal profits made from promoting child pornography with the Google search engine.
http://endmafia.com
http://cid-21ccdb1c1e0c985a.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!21CCDB1C1E0C985A!130.entry