In the bitter war between Yahoo! and Google over search engine index size, Google has decided to give its latest answer in the form of a question. The comapny said on monday that it had phased in a larger index over the last four weeks, Google unveiled an updated index it said is more than three times larger than that of any of its search engine competitors. But rather than directly proclaiming it, Google said it would ask web surfer to decide for themselve. Google's CEO Eric e. Schmidt, said the company would remove the current number from its home page (Searching 8,168,684,336 webpages) and instead ask visitors to guess the size of the new index. Moreover, in typical offbeat Google style, there will be no announced prize for the best guess, although Schmidt did not rule out the possibility that one would be rewarded. "We're suggesting that users do a little test", he said. Google said it would post a guidline to help users make their own comparisions on its weblog googleblog.blogspot.com although google would not specify the new index size, Google said it is about three times larger than its nearest competitor (read yahoo!). "We're celebrating our seventh birthday.... We had a pretty strong year. We're announcing tonight that in terms of unduplicated pages our index is now three times larger than any other search engine" Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with CNET News.com. In response, Yahoo issued a statement: "We congratulate Google on removing the index size number from its home page and for recognizing it is a meaningless number," Yahoo said in a statement. "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 search at http://search.yahoo.com."
I still get more hits for yahoo than google for my name "mitch andre garcia". Although Google says it has more it lists fewer.
This query returns zero results : http://www.google.co.in/search?q=adfadsfadsdfasfasdfaldfasdfasdf And this one (negation) returns...9,630,000,000 http://www.google.co.in/search?q=-adfadsfadsdfasfasdfaldfasdfasdf And this one...returns : 11,430,000,000 http://www.google.co.in/search?q=[*+*]
The compettion in search engne is getting tough...but the downline is that it all benifit all the users...
I'm happy, in the last couple of weeks I've seen my total number of pages climb by more than 500K. It seems that most of them are cached as well. Now just to find out if visitors are coming directly to any of them.
Interesting tactic, negating a single keyword and seeing the results. Never thought to try that! I also tried your technique on a number of strings that returned no results, and always got the 9,6... figure. That can't be random, especially since it's rounded! Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what it means? Also here's another, unrelated question - why does searching "the web" on different local Google sites (.co.uk, .co.in etc) return different results? Shouldn't it be identical?
I'd like to know what kind of math Google is doing. There are less than 80,000 of these documents, yet Google shows 416,000... [search=google]site:www.digitalpoint.com inurl:lists inurl:html[/search]
Interesting! I often find that Google will index new pages on a domain while failing to remove pages that I have renamed or deleted (yes, yes, bad practice I know...). Could this be the culprit? Do you have your own theory on the reasons?
I think google is unstoppabel now. For search engine it is the best. No other engine provides this much results and that also with accuracy.