Skip to main content

Google Says (Index) Size Doesn’t Matter

Online search engine Google turned seven years old today (quick, check out the birthday cake on its home page logo!), and announced that it has tripled the number of Web pages that its system can search. The announcement is undoubtedly intended to steal some thunder back from rival Yahoo which recently upstaged Google by claiming to search a substantially larger volume of Web pages.

Google has consistently disputed Yahoo’s claim, saying its own internal testing of Yahoo’s search and third-party examinations were unable to substantiate Yahoo’s claims. But, tomato, tomahto—Google doesn’t want to play anymore! Now Google’s director of consumer Web products, Marissa Mayer, says a figure representing the number of documents included in a search engine index is "no longer useful," Nonetheless, Google’s quick to point out that, even though numbers aren’t useful anymore, they’ve just made their index a whole lot bigger. According to Google engineer Anna Patterson, Google’s "newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index" and is "more than 3 times larger than any other search engine." Not that they’re counting or anything.

It’s easy to understand the point that the sheer number of pages searched isn’t particularly useful: just because a search a greater number of pages doesn’t mean those results are relevant or helpful; instead, the quality and sort order of the results are often more important than the sheer number of hits.

Instead of comparing the total number of documents alleged to be included in a search index, Google encourages users to evaluate the relevance of the results they receive from the search engines, particularly on obscure terms and queries which produce fewer than 1,000 results. According to Mayer, that’s where Google’s newly-tripled index is likely to produce more-relevant results than its competitors.

Let’s see: "geoff duncan" +millionaire +lottery… hmmph. Clearly they haven’t found everything.

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Samsung’s first flat mini-LED gaming monitor doesn’t come cheap
Samsung's 2023 Odyssey Neo G7 sitting on a table.

After announcing 2023's Odyssey Neo G7 earlier this year, Samsung finally revealed the price for the display. The 43-inch mini-LED monitor runs $1,000, and listings are live now. Unfortunately, it has some stiff competition from the best gaming monitors.

It's a significant size increase over last year's version, jumping from 32 inches to 43 inches while maintaining a 16:9 aspect ratio. Samsung says the panel has a 144Hz refresh rate and 1 millisecond response time, as well as DisplayHDR 600 certification from VESA and Samsung's own HDR10+ certification.

Read more
Google Meet or Zoom? Soon, it won’t matter
Google Meets on an HP Chromebook.

Google has announced support for embedded interoperability on Google Meet and Zoom Room devices at no extra cost, coming later this year.

Soon Google Meets devices will be able to join Zoom meetings, and Zoom Rooms will be able to join Google Meet meetings. It will be as easy to use as clicking on a calendar item or by inserting a meeting code. At launch, administrators will be able to activate this interoperability for their registered devices at no extra cost, while allowing trusted devices to easily join cross-platform calls.

Read more
Why Microsoft Surface still doesn’t have a true answer to the MacBook Air
The lid of the Surface Laptop 5.

Microsoft today announced new versions of its Surface line of PCs, including the Surface Laptop 5 and Surface Pro 9. The Surface Laptop 5, in particular, hasn't changed much over the years, but has remained a very thin and light laptop with a sleek build -- in many ways, the perfect foil to Apple's MacBook Air.

The Surface Laptop 5 makes some minor adjustments to the formula, adding a new color option and updated 12th-gen Intel processors. But in 2022, it doesn't feel like quite enough.

Read more