Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

The seach engines have always bragged about the size of their indexes. I've always felt it's more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. I mean, seriously, how much difference could it make to have 20 billion pages versus 15 billion? After a point, it's just more stuff to sift through. If anything, too large of an index could make it more difficult to return relevant results. I'm all for indexing as many pages as possible, but I've always believed that relevancy is much more important than index size. Since relevance is so much harder to define than index size, this is a way for the search engines to claim superiority in a quantifiable number.

Don't expect Yahoo's spot on top to last, though. After Google "investigates" the claims, I'm sure they'll either dispute the numbers or more likely, come out with their own announcement that they now index 50 billion documents. That's just the way it goes in this business. Meanwhile MSN will stand by and not say anything about the size of their search index, but they'll have a press conference that says they still plan to take over the universe within the next five years, maybe even before the release of their new operating system.

This from MediaPost:

YAHOO!'S CLAIM THIS WEEK THAT its search index now includes over 20 billion Web documents and images has drawn mixed reactions from experts and rivals alike. Until the announcement, it was assumed by many that Google had by far the largest search breadth. A Google spokesman said the company is currently investigating Yahoo!'s claims.

From MediaPost