Google Says (Index) Size Doesn’t Matter

By Geoff Duncan Published September 27, 2005

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.

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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.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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