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Yahoo!
completed
an index upgrade that gives it bragging rights to the relatively meaningless measurement of “largest index.” Yahoo!
claims to index 20-billion objects (pages and images), compared to Google’s 11.3-billion objects. It breaks down to
Yahoo! able to serve more than twice as many Web-page results.
Of course, with databases of this size, quality and relevance are far more important than yet more quantity.
Obviously, both engines cover the basics, the not-so-basics, the obscure, and a damn long tail beoynd the obscure. I’d
be much more interested in an announcement from one of them that it had found a foolproof way to detect and eliminate
spoofing and misdirection of all sorts. Will I ever see Yahoo!’s 18-billionth page? Who knows, and I certainly wasn’t
missing it. The hidden Web is what I’m missing—the many billions of pages secluded behind firewalls of barious kinds,
like the elusive dark matter of the universe.
Let’s remember, too, that most searchers never get beyond the first ten results. That puts the 20-billion pages in a
somewhat diminished perspective.
[Thanks to Daniel Terdiman]
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