NCSA Compares Google and Yahoo Index Numbers

chrisd (former Slashdot editor and now Google employee) writes "Recently, Yahoo claimed an increase of index size to "over 20 billion items", compared to Google's 8.16 billion pages. Now, researchers at NCSA have done their own, independent, comparison of the two engines. "

NCSA is comparing the archives...

[Anonymous Coward]

by surfing to each page in each archive with the most recent NCSA Mosaic.

It will take a while.

Re:Yahoo returns dupes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo returns a lot of dupes.

If that's the case, then why is Google the darling of slashdot? ;)

Re:Accurate results?

[DroopyStonx]

Um, GW Bush is the first result.

Seems fairly accurate to me...

Perl Code

[hayro]

I don't know about the study but that is the most readable perl code I have seen in a long time.

Results of my own study...

[Locke2005]

Google only reports "about 4,820,000" entries for Britney Spears, while Yahoo reports "about 67,100,000" entries! This makes Yahoo more than 12 times better than google! Yeah, my methodology is completely fucked up... but then, so is the NCSA's!

Re:Results of my own study...

[WillAffleckUW]

Google only reports "about 4,820,000" entries for Britney Spears, while Yahoo reports "about 67,100,000" entries! This makes Yahoo more than 12 times better than google! Yeah, my methodology is completely fucked up... but then, so is the NCSA's!

But that's because both Yahoo and Google cap results at 1000, so if you have more than that, it won't count for either engine.

Re:More please!

[Overzeetop]

Oh, please don't ask for "more like this". It just gives the editors a reason to think that there is a hardcore contigent of /. readers who crave dupes. I mean, how can they get more "like this" than to simply repost it in a couple of hours.

Re:What would you want them to return?

[mmkkbb]

Seems to me there is something wrong when a search term lists pages that don't even have the actual word in it.

donkey rhubarb [peta.com]

Once this comment is spidered, it will work towards PETA coming up when people search for "Donkey" and "rhubarb". If you check the cached version of the GW biography, it will say this at the top.

Re:Yahoo pants down, egg on face, no WMD either.

[okayplayer]

Did you not read the article a couple of days ago abou those "remotes" becoming federally illegal?

Re:Perl Code

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmm, getppid() is unimplimented on some platforms, so it could've handled that better in the call to srand(), but hey, it's still usable and it looks well-written :)