Yahoo passes Google in search database size



News.com (cnet) is reporting that Yahoo has surpassed Google in sheer numbers of items indexed in their search engine. Currently Yahoo has 20 billion documents and images, Google claims 11.3 billion. I can vouch from watching the logs at this site that the Googlebot has been trailing in visits compared to MSN and Yahoo both.



The real question though is more complex. Is Yahoo finding relevant search results. I mean with twice the data, is it half as useful? The Yahoo Search blog has the news as well.

To quote from their blog “We measure quality in terms of RCFP – Relevance, Comprehensiveness, Freshness, and Presentation and continue to work on improving those metrics.” Nice to hear they’re concerned about the relevance issue.

They also refer to an article at searchenginewatch.com talking about how little overlap there is between the different search engines given the same search term. 84.9% of the results in the study (done by dogpile) were unique to one search engine.

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