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Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched

Posted by timothy on from the it-depends-what-you're-looking-for dept.

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."

6 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. Googlebot is not very aggressive on internal links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    We recently launched a mobile search engine. The domain was registered, pages created, etc, so I'm observing it go from zero page rank, to having a page rank and getting crawled. Yahoo's bot definitely crawls more frequently, and Googlebot doesn't seem to crawl any links unless they are linked to from external pages. I assume that as the pagerank increases, Googlebot will get more aggressive, but from what I can see in the logs it's clear that Googlebot takes a "wait and see" approach to crawling.

    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.

  2. Re:Googlebot is not very aggressive on internal li by Eric+Giguere · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:fantastic by fembots · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  4. Re:fantastic by b0r1s · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  5. Re:Great... by mph · · Score: 4, Informative

    Adding "review" usually results in storefronts that say "Be the first to review this product!".

  6. Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... by Sancho · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.