Yahoo, Google Tussle Over Search Index Size

Yahoo’s announcement last week that its search engine index included 19.2 billion documents — more than twice the size of Google’s 8-billion plus — didn’t go over well at the search company with the higher stock price. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Google’s tests didn’t show up any discernible difference; Forrester analyst Charlene Li couldn’t find a difference, either. John Markoff reports that researchers at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications ran a random same of 10,012 queries and Yahoo came up with more results only 3 percent of the time; Google returned 166.9 percent more results than Yahoo on average. Markoff: “The group said the Yahoo index claim was suspicious.” Neither company makes its algorithms available.
Does size even matter in this case? Not past a billion or so for most consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal. In the end, it’s all about image and Yahoo’s attempt to show it had surpassed Google on some arcane technological level could backfire.
Lost in the shuffle are what may be the numbers with the most impact: Yahoo says it has indexed 1.6 billion images and more than 50 million multimedia files.

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