RSSGoogle Turns 7, Expands Search Index
By Nate Mook | Published September 27, 2005, 11:35 AM
As part of its seventh birthday celebration, Google on Tuesday announced it has expanded its search index, but will no longer offer a specific count of indexed Web documents on its homepage. Instead, Google simply claims that its search is three times larger than rivals.
Although Google will not provide numbers, which it explains "vary greatly and are no longer easily comparable," the company says the new index is 1,000 larger than when Google first launched. But quality is important when it comes to search results, not quantity.
To that end, Google is asking its users to see for themselves which search engine is bigger and not fall prey to basic index size measurements.
"Come up with a search query that's special to you (your name, your elementary school, and your favorite animal, for example) - a combination of words that is likely to exist on just a few web pages out of the billions we've indexed, a few needles scattered in the Internet’s endless haystack," says Google software engineer Anna Patterson.
Last month, Yahoo sparked a war of words when it claimed its search index had doubled Google in size with 19.2 billion Web documents. Google had previously listed on its homepage that it searched through 8.17 billion pages. In response, Google said it failed to notice an actual change in Yahoo's results.
Yahoo, which does not usually disclose its index size, seemed to concur with Google's new sentiment. "As we've said in the past, what matters is that consumers find what they are looking for and we invite Google users to compare their results to Yahoo," the company said in a statement.
Hey, if y'all go to http://www.google.com/in...orate/history.html#1998, it says that google had an index of 10,000 sites. If it is 1000x that, then google's index only increased to approximately 10,000,000. Just my theory.
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From Google History:
"one of our chief competitive advantages is surprise. And then there's innovation, and an almost fanatical devotion to our users"
Anyone else see that as being *very* monty pythonesque? (Think Inquisition...)
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Very interesting. Type ** into google to get an estimate of the search index. This validates my guess.
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Actually Google's been slipping, they make the same mistake a lot of companies do, they forget the "core". If I ran Google, I would put everyone in the company on R&D from the most brillant Phd to the floor sweeper, any idea, nothing too crazy, and rewrtite from scratch using the tightest code possible, or dedicated hardware (distributed computing too), for fastest response possible. There is still a "hidden web" out there and whoever grabs that wins, period, plain and simple, every computer, everywhere should run a "cleint" either via download or java that crawls pages. The desktop cleint should have this feature built in, crawl, crawl, crawl, get every morsel, every nugget of info. Then through math-magic, analyse the data, DATAMINING....result...$$$$$
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uhm...I don't want anything on my computer sitting there crawling internet sites in the background...thank you though.
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Umm... Google Desktop Search. Yeah, they say it won't report any personally identifiable information, but it has to report info like what you're looking for the most, where you find it, etc. Plus, anything you do through Google's website (anywhere) is added to their statistical analaysis. They pretty much are doing what you're saying.
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I did a search (as suggested) using my first name, last name, and favorite animal. Here are the numbers of possible matches found by a few engines:
Google - 41
WebCrawler - 13
Dogpile - 11
MSN - 7
Ask.com - 7
AltaVista - 4
Yahoo - 4
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Google - 4
Webcrawler - 3 (and a pile of crap)
Dogpile - 3 (and an even bigger pile of crap)
MSN - 2
Ask.com - 1
AltaVista - 2 (and 344,000 piles of crap unless I used quotes)
Yahoo - 1 (and a pile of crap)
There's your 3 winners...Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves.
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I just did my name on Google and Yahoo (First and Last in quotation marks)
Google: 68 results
Yahoo: 25 results
Google won.
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Just my name (first and last) in quotes got these results:
Google - 587
AltaVista - 411
Yahoo - 410
Ask.com - 120
Webcrawler - 43
Dogpile - 33
MSN - 32
Oddly enough, the results on Google actually contained my name, first and last, in the right order. Most of the results on the other search engines had weird variations on my name. I thought that was kind of strange considering I used quotes...
**EDIT**
lol... I can't even spell 'qoutes'
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dogpile.com collects results from google, yahoo, msn and others.
SO why don't we just use it and have the best of all worlds?
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I tried that, but there were just TOO MANY results. It always took me too long to find the information I was looking for because I had to sift through so many results that didn't really relate to my specific search.
I've gotten used to getting Google to find exactly what I'm looking for. But that's just my experience. Everyone has their own favorite search engine. =p
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Well yeah, but if it isn't Google, then they're using the wrong one.
:P
Just kidding people.
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won't announce how big their index is but just says its 3 times bigger then rivals? how convenient. Did you all know that I can bench press 300 pounds? No I won't show you, just believe me.
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I can benchpress alot more than you, forgie, but I won't say how much.. it's just a lot more.... :)
the whole thing does sound stupid. i just they don't want to fight with numbers anymore though, which is understandable. results is what really matters, and the war is very close now. yahoo has gained a lot of ground quick.
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Google is great as single web based search engine. Has anyone tried Copernic or Dogpile? They search multiple engines, and return better results than Google alone. Copernic Agent is beyond fast, and the way it lays out results from multiple search engines, is easy on the eyes, and not confusing. If you are looking for quick simple results, go with Google, but for many more choices, I use Copernic Agent. Don't confuse it with their award winning Desktop Search.
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