Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched 434
tonyquan writes "Yahoo announced today that its search engine passed Google's for overall capacity, with 20 billion documents and images indexed versus 11.3 billion for Google. Observers had previously pegged Yahoo's index at just 8 billion items. The growth is due to a recent expansion effort. More info can be found on the Yahoo! Search blog and at CNet."
Googlebot is not very aggressive on internal links (Score:5, Informative)
That's not a bad thing. There are a lot of useless pages out there, and having twice as many pages in the index certainly does not mean twice as many useful pages.
I am glad to see the search engine wars are on and competitive.
Why Google ain't all that (Score:0, Informative)
First, Google is NOT an innovator. Why not? Everything they do is a slight improvement on existing services:
- Search: Sure, it's the best search around, but it is simply an improvement over existing search services. And by now Yahoo's search is comparable. Soon there will be many equivalent search engines.
- Maps: Looks pretty, but it's just an incremental improvement over existing services. Trivial for Yahoo or anyone else to catch up.
- GMail: Nothing to see here except very good marketing. Who ever uses 1 GB of email? Nobody.
A lot of Google's services actually suck if you think about it. Froogle? Google Images? Those are a joke. And thanks for breaking Google Groups to make it unusable.
If you think Google is the greatest thing since sliced bread, take a deep breath and realize that it's just a company that is very good at marketing, and making lots of money.
Google is an advertising company, they are not a technology company. They are not true innovators like, say, Apple or Oracle. Just look at the reasons I outlined above to understand why. A true innovator ushers in a new age. Like Apple with the iPod and digital music. Or Oracle with database systems. Google hasn't ushered in a new age of anything.
Stop the hype.
Re:Great... (Score:4, Informative)
You must not have used Google recently. It's been about 2 years since Google stopped returning useful results. Now, most of the results are crap. Unfortunately, there isn't a better search engine out there.
Hey Yahoo (Score:3, Informative)
it's the motion of the ocean.
Re:Why Google ain't all that (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Googlebot is not very aggressive on internal li (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fantastic (Score:4, Informative)
Re:fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great... (Score:4, Informative)
or
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q
Re:If anyone can do it... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Several interpretations (Score:3, Informative)
Say using the old technique of searching for typos I just tried Yahoo and Google. Yahoo reports five matches versus Google's five. However out of the five Yahoo matches three of them are spurious!
Some other searches with their actual count:
Yahoo 1, Google 1.
Yahoo 0, Google 1.
Yahoo 1, Google 5.
Yahoo 26, Google 36.
This reminds me of an old Altavista crawl, where they discovered that nearly 10% of their pages where non-standard 401 pages.
Re:Great... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... (Score:5, Informative)
Search for:
super mario world hacks
on each of Yahoo and Google, and check the first hit. Google takes it hands down, with an entire page devoted to SMW hacks, vs. Yahoo's page on SNES hacks.
I routinely try other search engines, and while another one occasionally trumps Google, the big G tends to come out on top overall.
Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... (Score:2, Informative)
The Search Engine Size Game (Score:3, Informative)
For popular search terms (queries with millions of hits) index size doesn't matter much. Yahoo, google, ask, msn etc all produce pretty similar results (that tend to favor established sites/pages.) For rare terms or combinations, which contribute to the Long Tail [wikipedia.org] of web search, index size is very important. Both Yahoo and Google report estimated (often inflated) hits for popular terms and exact numbers for rare terms, which still include dups. You need to go to the last result page to find out the exact non-dup number, which sometimes can shrink the de-dup'ed hits by a factor of 10. Let's see how the new yahoo fairs against google with a few queries I picked randomly:
Yahoo used to consistently underperform google on rare terms, it seems they indeed have caught up. But it has NOT really exceeded google in terms of useful size (Yahoo has more dups.) Still, it's a worthy engineering effort. Congrats!
Re:95% of which is crap (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, this is the 2nd result when searching for "ping yahoo" on Yahoo! and only the 9th result when searching on Google (the first 8 are much less relevant).
This is typical example [webmasterworld.com] of real-life "ping yahoo.com to check if you're online" suggestion.
P.S. And personally I do ping yahoo.com. The are the Internet and compared to them Google is insignificant.
Re:fantastic (Score:1, Informative)
If you want to get rid of those pages with all words known to mankind on it, uses "-".
Example:
Google: +Hawking => 2,450,000 results.
Google: +Hawking -sex -mp3 -money => 1,210,000 results.
If you want to get (partially) rid of those dynamically generated pages use double keywords and/or quotation marks.
Examples:
Google: +Hawking => 2,450,000 results
Google: +Hawking +Hawking => 2,190,000 results
Google: +Stephen +Hawking => 893,000 results
Google: +"Stephen Hawking" => 774,000 results.
Combine everything to nicely start to cut away some noise.
Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... (Score:4, Informative)
I can only agree here. A couple of interesting points, yahoo will index your website whether or not any site in the world is pointing a link to it, and yahoo actually pays attention to the the meta tags at the top. Now while I'll be the first one to observe that meta tags have been abused horribly, in a lot of cases they do in fact represent the content of the site well. Its no more of a risk than any of the other criteria used to index websites, really. The quality of google's search and image search has declined quite a bit in the last few months, the question is whether or not they recognise that.
Tuva != middle of nowhere (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, it's hardly the middle of nowhere, as it has become famous for its traditional throat singing. One of the people who made it famous was Richard Feynman; I first learned of Tuva as I was searching for stuff on Feynman. It shouldn't be news to any fan of Feynman that he was into obscure music.
If you're looking for less well known parts of the world, you might have a look at the other 'autonomous republics' within Russia, such as Komi or Mari.
I am not surprised. (Score:4, Informative)
My site [rollingears.com], for example, has been up and running for nearly two months, submitted a few times and actually linked to by a few pages that are indexed by Google but it still doesn't appear *at all* in Googles index, not even far in the bottom.
Even if you enter site:www.....com in the search bar directly, it just says it doesn't know it. At least Yahoo has got it in there, never mind high ranked or not.