Earlier this week, the document-counters at Google
did two silly things.
First, they announced they were ending their participation
in what has become known as the "size war". They removed the
document-counter on their front page and acknowledged the size of a search
engine's index does not necessarily reflect the most important measure
of a good search tool, relevance. "At Google we believe the essential
quality of an index isn't the total number of documents, but its comprehensiveness
- which unique documents are in the index."
Minutes after declaring an end to the size war, they
announced that they actually do have the largest index, claiming to now
be three times larger than any other search engine.
That set a number of search engine observers to talking,
a discussion that was summed up by Danny Sullivan yesterday in the Search
Engine Watch blog .
In a telephone interview with the Reuters news agency,
Marissa Mayer, Director of consumer web products said, We believe that
we have an index that is three times larger without counting duplicate
pages."
Google recommends web users test obscure search terms
producing less than 1000 results to evaluate the usefulness of Google's
increased depth. As stated on their Sizing Up Search Engines page,
"To see for yourself, try searching for something
very specific, or try a query that previously returned very few results.
For example, you could enter your name or hometown, along with your favorite
color or animal. Navigate to the last page to see how many results the
search engine really delivered. (On the last page, you may have to click
the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link
to see all the results.) Do this on different search engines for several
queries and see what you come up with."
Yahoo has not responded to Google's not-so-subtle pokes
at the time of this writing but if they do, the war of perceptions will
be back.
About The Author
Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert
based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for StepForth and
is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has
worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunïty to share
his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements.
He can be reached at
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