Search Index Size Does Not Matter

We recently covered Yahoo's claim of increased index size.Based on the data created from sample searches, the study conducted at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 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 (9676) 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 the study that Yahoo!'s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google's index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, it is puzzling that Yahoo!'s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google. This confirms what John Battelle reported as Google response to Yahoo’s claim of increase in index size. The whole index size thing development is increasingly becoming more and more curious