Web Marketing Breaking News
Google Bows out of "Index Size" Game
September 28, 2005

Earlier this week, Google stopped displaying the number of pages they have in their index. Google officially commented: "At Google we believe the essential quality of an index isn't the total number of documents, but its comprehensiveness - which unique documents are in the index."

Interestingly, just after declaring they were no longer fighting in the "size war", they announced that they actually do have the largest index, claiming to now be three times larger than any other search engine, including Yahoo! who has claimed an index as large as 19 billion pages.

We debunked the claim by Yahoo! of their index size (information released in our SEO Revolution newsletter), so it isn't likely that Google is above that level.

In a telephone interview with the Reuters news agency, Marissa Mayer, Director of consumer web products said, "We believe that we have an index that is three times larger without counting duplicate pages." That is a massive slam on Yahoo! who's 19 billion pages included a massive amount of duplicate pages.

Google recommends web users test obscure search terms producing less than 1000 results to evaluate the usefulness of Google's increased depth. As stated on their Sizing Up Search Engines page,

"To see for yourself, try searching for something very specific, or try a query that previously returned very few results. For example, you could enter your name or hometown, along with your favorite color or animal. Navigate to the last page to see how many results the search engine really delivered. (On the last page, you may have to click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link to see all the results.) Do this on different search engines for several queries and see what you come up with."

Yahoo has not responded to Google's public slam. Stay tuned, this could get good. I can imagine the jabs that Matt and Tim with throw down at Webmaster World. I wonder if Brett Tabke will be selling "ring side" seats for it?!?!