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. "