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Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched
tonyquan writes "Yahoo announced today that its search engine passed Google's for overall capacity, with 20 billion documents and images indexed versus 11.3 billion for Google. Observers had previously pegged Yahoo's index at just 8 billion items. The growth is due to a recent expansion effort. More info can be found on the Yahoo! Search blog and at CNet."
That's not a bad thing. There are a lot of useless pages out there, and having twice as many pages in the index certainly does not mean twice as many useful pages.
I am glad to see the search engine wars are on and competitive.
Google keeps and holds its users because searches *work*.
You must not have used Google recently. It's been about 2 years since Google stopped returning useful results. Now, most of the results are crap. Unfortunately, there isn't a better search engine out there.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I agree about Froogle. Usually over 90% of all items can't be ordered by price even though the engine was clearly able to determine what the price was. How is it being froogle if you can't easily figure out which is the cheapest?
The Yahoo! crawler (Slurp) is definitely more aggressive than the Googlebot. It comes knocking on my door several times a day, especially the blog pages. Google is more conservative and keeps things in a sandbox, too.
While 9 billion additional pages are pretty useless to an individual, it can however mean each topic will have an additional 30 pages, or a search on Ferrari images gives another 25 pictures.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Google's index should be growing faster in the coming months. With more and more webmasters implementing Google's sitemap helpers, a lot of unlinked/dynamic pages should start showing up very, very soon.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= countersink+screw+methods= countersink+screw+technique
or
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Adding "review" usually results in storefronts that say "Be the first to review this product!".
Multiple search engines are probably the way to go, honestly, but here's some counter-anecdotal evidence.
Search for:
super mario world hacks
on each of Yahoo and Google, and check the first hit. Google takes it hands down, with an entire page devoted to SMW hacks, vs. Yahoo's page on SNES hacks.
I routinely try other search engines, and while another one occasionally trumps Google, the big G tends to come out on top overall.
For popular search terms (queries with millions of hits) index size doesn't matter much. Yahoo, google, ask, msn etc all produce pretty similar results (that tend to favor established sites/pages.) For rare terms or combinations, which contribute to the Long Tail of web search, index size is very important. Both Yahoo and Google report estimated (often inflated) hits for popular terms and exact numbers for rare terms, which still include dups. You need to go to the last result page to find out the exact non-dup number, which sometimes can shrink the de-dup'ed hits by a factor of 10. Let's see how the new yahoo fairs against google with a few queries I picked randomly:
Yahoo used to consistently underperform google on rare terms, it seems they indeed have caught up. But it has NOT really exceeded google in terms of useful size (Yahoo has more dups.) Still, it's a worthy engineering effort. Congrats!
I can only agree here. A couple of interesting points, yahoo will index your website whether or not any site in the world is pointing a link to it, and yahoo actually pays attention to the the meta tags at the top. Now while I'll be the first one to observe that meta tags have been abused horribly, in a lot of cases they do in fact represent the content of the site well. Its no more of a risk than any of the other criteria used to index websites, really. The quality of google's search and image search has declined quite a bit in the last few months, the question is whether or not they recognise that.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Google refuses to index pages that aren't linked to by at least a gazillion other sites, submitted or not.
My site, for example, has been up and running for nearly two months, submitted a few times and actually linked to by a few pages that are indexed by Google but it still doesn't appear *at all* in Googles index, not even far in the bottom.
Even if you enter site:www.....com in the search bar directly, it just says it doesn't know it. At least Yahoo has got it in there, never mind high ranked or not.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book