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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."

42 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. fantastic by abrotman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My google-fu isn't bad, but I sometimes have trouble finding relevant results. I figure adding 9 billion more possible results should complicate things quite nicely.

    1. Re:fantastic by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I always wonder about that. How many of those billions of additions to the engine pages that retroactively generate pages according to what is searched for?

      I *hate* those pages the most, as they usually have every word in mankind listed in six or more languages, and just so happen to grab the one you're looking for just to suck you in to their million popups.

      I guess quality verses quantity will be an afterthought; we're about to see quite the cache expansion if my gut feeling is right.

      --
      "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
    2. 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.
    3. 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
    4. Re:fantastic by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I figure adding 9 billion more possible results should complicate things quite nicely.
      How do you figure? Do you find it harder to find restaurants in large cities?
    5. Re:fantastic by HD+Webdev · · Score: 4, Funny

      How do you figure? Do you find it harder to find restaurants in large cities?

      Only if most of those restaurants in large cities give you a menu that only lists Viagra as something you can order.

      --
      This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
    6. Re:fantastic by xs650 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If over 1/2 the restaurants in big cities were fake restaurants built to look like the restaurant you were looking for, yes it would be.

    7. Re:fantastic by natrius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You, sir, win the award for worst analogy ever. Restaurants only stay in business if enough people patronize them to make the restaurant worth running. Web pages, on the other hand, are almost, if not totally free to toss up. Some things are crap, some things are gold, but I think the crap to gold ratio goes way up as the number of pages increases. The crap that goes up on the internet stays up, the crappy restaurants don't. Google's PageRank is supposed to filter out things that no one else thinks is worthy of linking to, which can eliminate much of the problems caused by a high crap to gold ratio, but the gradparent's statement that adding many more web pages may harm results is a perfectly plausible assertion.

  2. Yahoo! playing Tortoise to Google's Hare by Ohmster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's interesting to see that Yahoo! may have surpassed Google on this metric. Over the past decade, Yahoo! has beaten other "hares" to date, including AOL and Microsoft's MSN. They're doing some innovative stuff, but also have some areas to catch up on. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_merits_o.htm l

    1. Re:Yahoo! playing Tortoise to Google's Hare by cybersaga · · Score: 4, Funny

      but also have some areas to catch up on

      Like how to park?

      --
      Web Design Tips
  3. Great by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now all Yahoo has to do is create a real search engine that can actually spew out relevant results amongst those 20 billion entries...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Great by jalefkowit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Have you actually tried Yahoo lately?

      I've been finding that Yahoo's engine is as good at returning relevant results as Google, at least for my searches. In fact, in some cases it is even better at putting the most relevant hit in the first position than Google is.

      Of course, YMMV. But if you're still going off impressions of Yahoo Search you formed back in 1997, you might want to give their new-and-improved engine a spin sometime...

      --

      Read my blog.

  4. Great... by Lewisham · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...now it'll be even harder to find anything on Yahoo! Google keeps and holds its users because searches *work*. When I search for something, Google has a very high chance of giving me what I want in 4 pages or so. Yahoo! isn't as good at getting me the information I want. The problem might even be made *worse* with all these pages. Yahoo! has never said, AFAIK, how it ranks pages, but Google does it better. With this wealth of data, the ranking system is going to be under much more scrutiny at picking the right pages.

    1. Re:Great... by donutello · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    2. Re:Great... by MacJedi · · Score: 3, Interesting
      It's been about 2 years since Google stopped returning useful results. Now, most of the results are crap.
      This has not, in general, been my experience. Can you give an example where a reasonable search yields results that are mostly "crap?"
      --
      2^5
    3. Re:Great... by bedroll · · Score: 5, Funny
      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=crap&btnG=Goo gle+Search

      had to do it, sorry..

    4. Re:Great... by AEton · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Searching for information on digital cameras, especially less popular ones, often yields dozens of pages of sites that want to sell one and no descriptions of user experiences or reviews. (Even the manufacturers' own product description is usually hard to find.)

      This problem is not specific to digital cameras - it's endemic to any piece of hardware that the majority of the Internet is interested in selling rather than discussing. It's great that your Yahoo! Storefront and its twenty clones want to give me a great deal on the Flibbet Jibbet Cog, but I'd really like to know what people who use it think about it.

      (Occasionally some results with "flibbetyjibbit linux compatibility" will work - but never general product information!)

      --
      We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
    5. Re:Great... by way2trivial · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= countersink+screw+methods
      or
      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= countersink+screw+technique

      --
      every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
    6. Re:Great... by mph · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    7. Re:Great... by poofyhairguy82 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Searching for information on digital cameras, especially less popular ones, often yields dozens of pages of sites that want to sell one and no descriptions of user experiences or reviews.

      Simple answer, put this in Google (or whatever):

      cameramodel review -checkout -buy -shipping

      Then get what you want. The engines can't read your mind. They don't know if you want to buy one, see a review for one, get a hack for one, sell one, etc.

      --

      Open Source Sushi

  5. 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.

  6. More important by Chairboy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    A newsflash that's more important to me is how, years ago, Google passed Yahoo's abillity to display relevant results.

    Why isn't programmer efficiency measured in KLOCs? Because quality is more important than quantity when used as the only metric.

  7. Quantity versus quality by IamGarageGuy+2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't believe that volume of pages is really a relevant metric to be used in the case of search results. With an infinite number of pages the real metric comes down to relevance.

    --
    Stay tuned for new sig...
  8. 20 billion documents, I wonder... by baylanger · · Score: 5, Funny

    Are those 20 billion documents, the actual SPAMs I received at my yahoo mail account since 1994?

  9. 95% of which is crap by darkCanuck · · Score: 5, Interesting
    • useless blogs and geocities "websites": 12 billion
    • clipart, midi and hideous backgrounds for above websites: 6 billion
    • links to outdated or expired user sessions: 1 billion
    • real content: 1 billion, if lucky
    The only thing I ever use Yahoo for is if and when my internet connection seems slow or dead I ping yahoo.com. It's just been a habit since the 90's.
  10. Re:Why Google ain't all that by HeroreV · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

  11. 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.

  12. It's true, and easy to check... by NotQuiteReal · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I did a search for "a" on both Google and Yahoo.

    Results:

    Google: "1-10 of about 3,120,000,000 .06 sec"
    Yahoo: "1-10 of about 11,300,000,000 .08 sec"

    Top yahoo hit - some punk band. Top Google hit, apple .com.

    Gee, who do you think will make more money with those results... ;-)

    --
    This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
  13. Big Increase - Simple Explanation by ndansmith · · Score: 5, Funny

    The increase can be explained by Yahoo adding Slashdot dupes to their index.

  14. My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... by mosel-saar-ruwer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've spent the last few days doing some very important searching - we're thinking about launching a new product in a rather arcane field, and I wanted to be absolutely certain who the potential competition might be - hence I decided to search both Google & Yahoo!.

    Guess what? Yahoo! search beats Google search, hands down. Not even close.

    Two thoughts:

    1) While everybody was oohing and ahhing about Google's IPO, Yahoo! very quietly went about purchasing some excellent search engine/caching outfits, like Inktomi and AllTheWeb, and, owing to the great dot-com bust, paid only pennies on the dollar in acquiring some outstanding talent and intellectual property.

    2) I think Google's been reading too many of their own press releases, and has been resting on their laurels for a few years now. And it doesn't help matters that their CEO, Eric Schmidt, is the same fella who damn near drove Novell to bankruptcy.

    1. Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... by coflow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I do think this is interesting to note, but I have to ask you as a business man, what matters more to you, the quality of the search or the number of people using the search engine. From anecdotal evidence, I can tell you that I maybe know of 3 or 4 people who use yahoo to search, and pretty much everybody else uses google or has firefox search toolbar set to google.

      I can make a better hamburger than McDonald's can, but you're probably better off investing in them than you are in me.

    2. 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.

    3. Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... by Darkman,+Walkin+Dude · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
  15. Re:Why Google ain't all that by daniel_mcl · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nonsense.

    Search: Google's Pagerank concept radically changed the way that search engines determined which results were relevant. While previous services were based on human rankings or on how many times a particular word was listed on the page, Google put out an automated system which was able to deliver more relevant results when confronted with normal sites and, by its very design, much harder to exploit with SEO techniques. Further, Google continually tweaks the parameters of their search -- if you can go to one of Norvig's talks about the sorts of stuff they do, it's amazing.

    Maps: That interface -- scrolling, markers, and all -- is done entirely in javascript. No plugins, no flash, no helpers. Nobody thought that that sort of thing was even possible.

    GMail: I don't use it, so I can't comment. But I do have around 1 GB of email on my primary account. When you use email for serious work, it can add up.

    Google Groups: It's my group reader. I like it because it shows the discussions in thread format from the top and supresses the quoting that can make USENET discussions turn into pages and pages of greater-than symbols.

    As to your assertion that Google hasn't ushered in a new age, I disagree. Ten years ago, when someone wanted information they went to a library, an encyclopedia, or maybe a CD-ROM. Now, any time anyone wants to know anything, they go immediately to Google and chances are that the information will come up on the first page.

    Lest you've forgotten, it was Napster and Winamp that 0popularized mp3's, not the iPod, and COBOL, not Oracle, that popularized the database. So I'd respond to you, "Stop the misinformation campaign."

    --
    I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
  16. If anyone can do it... by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... how come no one is?

    Where else can I find the likes of Y! Calender / Mail / Address book, all integrated, for free? Point me there and I might jump ship.

    GMail is great for email, but it's address book is a POS, and there is no calendering whatsoever. Meanwhile, over at Y!, I have a calender that not only shows me the weather forecast for the week embedded into it, but it also issues me reminder notices via Y! IM for important dates.

    Not to mention the vast usefulness of other Y! services like Launch! and Y! Photos.

    Google may be leading the way as far as search, maps, and email goes, but for other services, *they* are the ones playing catch-up. For example, see their "Customized" home page, which http://my.yahoo.com/ had beat about 3 years ago.

  17. Re:Google needs to become mature like Yahoo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    In other news, some guy wrote a Slashdot post and linked to his own blog. Woah, shocker. 9_9

  18. Google vs. Yahoo crawl frequency by flinxmeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've noticed that Yahoo's crawl visits my site more frequently...but Google's crawl seems to be intelligent about how often it crawls.

    If I update alot, google crawls more. Yahoo doesn't seem to care.

    So all these folks talking about yahoo being better may be off the mark. Why crawl all the time when you can only crawl when necessary?

  19. What on earth? by mcc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So.. Yahoo is mature and Google is not because Google's news service reprints many and varied websites-- but not some of the "blogs" you like-- and Yahoo's news service reprints Reuters? I'm not entirely sure what's going on here but it sounds like you are misinterpreting some kind of personal poor experience with Google's sales department as an actual problem.

    Google and Yahoo news do not even offer remotely the same kind of service, nor are the services equal in importance. Yahoo News is almost closer to the core of Yahoo's service than even the search; Google News is more auxiliary from Google's perspective, and I don't think they're even getting much money off of them.

    Anyway, frankly IMO "blogs" shouldn't be on google news anyway. Period. If I wanted a blog aggregator, I'd go to a blog aggregator. Google News is a news aggregator. The difference may mostly be only in terms of what the aggregated sites choose to identify themselves as, but that's enough of a difference for me.

    As for AdSense, the categories based on which things can get classified as inappropriate for AdSense are extremely broad and if you're expecting close attention paid to border cases, I think you're expecting things of the service that the service never intended. And if the person your complaint here concerns is Michelle Malkin...? Well, from what I've read of her stuff, if you're trying to defend her against accusations of racism then some article about Nelson Mandela would be only the tiniest part of the problem.

    Don't be surprised if in a few more years of broadband development, that Yahoo is able to position itself as an alternative to many cable TV providers.

    Wait, wasn't this exact same prediction being batted around, like, five to seven years ago? And didn't it fail to work out then either? Hm, you are a blogger, aren't you.

    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
  20. I've got Results as to why I prefer Google: by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 5, Interesting
    OK: I did a brain fart search on both engines. The word? Kyzyl. It's the capital of Tuva. Tuva is an obscure little suburb of Mongolia. Yep. When you think your stupid relatives who bought a place in Indiana live in the middle of Nowhere, you're wrong. Tuva Is The Middle Of Nowhere.

    So, In Firefox tab A, I have Google and tab B is Yahoo. Both searched on Kyzyl.

    Results (pleae pay attention because htmling this was a pain...):

    Yahoo's first 5 entries:

    * All Russia Hotels All Russian Hotels - We offer discount hotel reservation services online in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Russia, Ukraine, CIS and Baltic. www.allrussiahotels.com

    * Tuva Travel Kyzyl city is the capital of Tuva Republic (Russia) Kyzyl city is positioned right in the center of Asia, which is proudly claimed by a local monument specifically dedicated to this fact. www.sokoltours.com

    WEB RESULTS

    1. Wikipedia: Kyzyl
    Open this result in new window
    Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia's article on 'Kyzyl' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyzyl

    - More from this site - Save - Block

    2. Weather Underground: Kyzyl, Russia Forecast
    Open this result in new window Find the Weather for any City, State or ZIP Code, or Airport Code or Country. Email. Password. Maps. United States. International. Information. Refinance Rates. GoTo Meeting. Kyzyl Singles. Hosting Companies. Online deals! Vitamins. Internet Mall ... Updated: 8:00 AM KRAST on August 02, 2005. Observed at Kyzyl, Russia (History) Elevation: 2064 ft / 629 m ... Coming soon: Flash Stickers. Kyzyl, 63 F / 17 C ...
    www.wunderground.com/global/stations/36096.html
    - 64k - Cached - More from this site - Save - Block

    3. AllRefer.com - Kyzyl (CIS And Baltic Political Geography) - Encyclopedia
    Open this result in new window

    3. AllRefer.com reference and encyclopedia resource provides complete information on Kyzyl, CIS And Baltic Political Geography. Includes related research links. ... By Alphabet : Encyclopedia A-Z - K. Kyzyl, CIS And Baltic Political Geography ... Kyzyl or Kizil[both: kizil'] Pronunciation Key, city (1989 pop ...
    reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/K/Kyzyl
    More from this site - Save - Block

    Now, for the first five Google Results on Kyzyl:

    Kyzyl'-administrative center of Republic of Tuva, Russia Kyzyl' Republic of Tuva,
    |Central-Chernozemny| ... Republic Capital:, Kyzyl. Capital Population:, 91000( at 01/01/94) ...
    members.tripod.com/~argun/kyzyl.htm
    - 5k - Cached - Similar pages

    Kyzyl on Encyclopedia.com
    Kyzyl or Kizilboth: kzl, city (1989 pop. 85000), capital of Tuva Republic, S Siberian Russia, on the Yenisei River. It services motor transport and has ...
    www.encyclopedia.com/html/K/Kyzyl.asp
    - 47k - Cached - Similar pages

    Kyzyl Travel Information. Photos, Stories and Diaries about Kyzyl
    Sustainable Tourism for independent travellers (travelers) and backpackers. www.worldsurface.com/browse/location.asp?locationi d=5654
    - 59k - Cached - Similar pages

    Kyzyl, Tuva, Russia current local time
    Kyzyl, Tuva, Russia - before placing a telephone call or making travel plans for a flight or hotel, get the current local time provided by ...
    www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_RU-TY.aspx ?city=Kyzyl
    - 17k - C

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
  21. The Search Engine Size Game by vicaya · · Score: 3, Informative

    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:

    • "Acid Brass" stockport - yahoo:20 google:24
    • "anetan district" - yahoo:17 google:15
    • "chunder blunder" - yahoo:25 google:27
    • "information theoretical death" - yahoo:45 google:46
    • kliningan juru - yahoo:27 google:47
    • "phylogenetic organisms" - yahoo:5 google:10
    • zibelthiurdos thrace - yahoo:9 google:4

    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!

  22. Let me explain by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem is the difference between raw data and useful information.

    When you look through a list of restaurants (or the list of anything in the yellow pages), you're looking at something put together based on _semantics_. Some human put that list together and made sure the _meaning_ is what you'd expect there: you can actually drive to one of those locations and order food.

    Search engines, on the other hand, just look at the words and have no bloody clue of semantics.

    If someone ever put together a list of restaurants, it would just be a list of all people who ever said the word "restaurant". Including everyone who ever said "I hate chinese restaurants" or "I took my gf to a restaurant" or "I went to see a new apartment, but it was above a restaurant" or whatever. Needless to say, driving to most of those locations would be a bloody useless exercise.

    Adding another 20 million people to that kind of indexing would just raise the noise-to-signal ratio, not actually produce anything useful.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  23. I am not surprised. by mrjb · · Score: 3, Informative

    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