NCSA Compares Google and Yahoo Index Numbers

chrisd (former Slashdot editor and now Google employee) writes "Recently, Yahoo claimed an increase of index size to "over 20 billion items", compared to Google's 8.16 billion pages. Now, researchers at NCSA have done their own, independent, comparison of the two engines. "

Comments

Conclusion

[mboverload]

"Based on the data created from our sample searches, this study concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9,676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results. It is the opinion of this study that Yahoo!'s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Googles index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, we find it puzzling that Yahoo!'s search engine consistently returned less results than Google. "

Re:Accurate results?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is called a "Google Bomb"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

Not only does Google do More, it does Better

[Ralph Spoilsport]

In regards to a similar article last week, I posted my own personal results on what I found when I did a search on Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva.

Google not only gave MORE results, it gave BETTER results. The only bad results were some hairsplitting (if largely well meant) from fellow /.ers... (I mentioned Tuva as a suburb of Mongolia, and while it IS a part of the Russian Federation, it is Much More Mongolian than Russian. And if the rising tide of neoNazi scum in Russia get their way, Tuva could easily be cut adrift into the Mongolian/Chinese orbit...but I digress...)

The essential point is: Which Does the Job Better For Me? Google. Therefore, I use Google. Assuming the Copernican position that I am not atypical, I would therefore extrapolate that this is very true for most other people as well. Which means that Yahoo has a LONG way to go and A LOT more work to do.

RS

Re:Proper name samples

[Zapdos]

From the Article:
However, in the case of Yahoo! the actual number of search results returned is only one-fifth the estimated total.

Re:What would you want them to return?

[quanticle]

Actually Slashdot prevents robots from spidering its comment pages...

So your point is totally moot...