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The Internet Businesses Google

Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched 434

Posted by timothy from the it-depends-what-you're-looking-for dept.
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."
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Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched More

Yahoo Passes Google in Total Items Searched

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  • fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)

    by abrotman ( 323016 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:44PM (#13275358)
    My google-fu isn't bad, but I sometimes have trouble finding relevant results. I figure adding 9 billion more possible results should complicate things quite nicely.

    • Re:fantastic (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:49PM (#13275393)
      I always wonder about that. How many of those billions of additions to the engine pages that retroactively generate pages according to what is searched for?

      I *hate* those pages the most, as they usually have every word in mankind listed in six or more languages, and just so happen to grab the one you're looking for just to suck you in to their million popups.

      I guess quality verses quantity will be an afterthought; we're about to see quite the cache expansion if my gut feeling is right.

    • Re:fantastic (Score:4, Informative)

      by fembots ( 753724 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:23PM (#13275567) Homepage
      While 9 billion additional pages are pretty useless to an individual, it can however mean each topic will have an additional 30 pages, or a search on Ferrari images gives another 25 pictures.

    • Re:fantastic (Score:5, Informative)

      by b0r1s ( 170449 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:27PM (#13275585) Homepage
      Google's index should be growing faster in the coming months. With more and more webmasters implementing Google's sitemap helpers, a lot of unlinked/dynamic pages should start showing up very, very soon.

    • Re:fantastic (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:53PM (#13275723)
      I figure adding 9 billion more possible results should complicate things quite nicely.
      How do you figure? Do you find it harder to find restaurants in large cities?

      • Re:fantastic (Score:5, Funny)

        by HD Webdev ( 247266 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @10:25PM (#13275860) Homepage Journal
        How do you figure? Do you find it harder to find restaurants in large cities?

        Only if most of those restaurants in large cities give you a menu that only lists Viagra as something you can order.

        • Re:fantastic (Score:3, Insightful)

          by timeOday ( 582209 )
          How do you know the 9BN pages google's not indexing are not worth indexing? How would google know? And if they did know those pages were no good, how would indexing them pose a risk of obscuring the better pages?

      • Re:fantastic (Score:5, Insightful)

        by xs650 ( 741277 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @12:30AM (#13276304)
        If over 1/2 the restaurants in big cities were fake restaurants built to look like the restaurant you were looking for, yes it would be.

      • Re:fantastic (Score:5, Insightful)

        by natrius ( 642724 ) <niran @ n i r a n . o rg> on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @01:25AM (#13276505) Homepage
        You, sir, win the award for worst analogy ever. Restaurants only stay in business if enough people patronize them to make the restaurant worth running. Web pages, on the other hand, are almost, if not totally free to toss up. Some things are crap, some things are gold, but I think the crap to gold ratio goes way up as the number of pages increases. The crap that goes up on the internet stays up, the crappy restaurants don't. Google's PageRank is supposed to filter out things that no one else thinks is worthy of linking to, which can eliminate much of the problems caused by a high crap to gold ratio, but the gradparent's statement that adding many more web pages may harm results is a perfectly plausible assertion.

      • Let me explain (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @06:38AM (#13277285) Journal
        The problem is the difference between raw data and useful information.

        When you look through a list of restaurants (or the list of anything in the yellow pages), you're looking at something put together based on _semantics_. Some human put that list together and made sure the _meaning_ is what you'd expect there: you can actually drive to one of those locations and order food.

        Search engines, on the other hand, just look at the words and have no bloody clue of semantics.

        If someone ever put together a list of restaurants, it would just be a list of all people who ever said the word "restaurant". Including everyone who ever said "I hate chinese restaurants" or "I took my gf to a restaurant" or "I went to see a new apartment, but it was above a restaurant" or whatever. Needless to say, driving to most of those locations would be a bloody useless exercise.

        Adding another 20 million people to that kind of indexing would just raise the noise-to-signal ratio, not actually produce anything useful.

  • Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rupy ( 782781 )
    Provided it is correct... I don't suppose there is any third party organisation that was allowed limited access to the data to confirm it?
    • Just go there [yahoo.com] and see for yourself: a search on the word "a" (letter "a", whatever) yield 11.5bn results. If you admit there may be twice as many pages without "a" in it (say, all non-latin webpages, files, jpgs and such), that's pretty close to their 20bn entries.

      Of course, now if you still doubt, you're welcome to count all 11.5bn results and make sure none of them are dupes :-)
      • "Of course, now if you still doubt, you're welcome to count all 11.5bn results and make sure none of them are dupes :-)"

        Thats easy to do, just submit all 11.5bn pages as stories on slashdot and the dups will automatically appear on the front page!

    • My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mosel-saar-ruwer ( 732341 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:26PM (#13275582)

      I've spent the last few days doing some very important searching - we're thinking about launching a new product in a rather arcane field, and I wanted to be absolutely certain who the potential competition might be - hence I decided to search both Google & Yahoo!.

      Guess what? Yahoo! search beats Google search, hands down. Not even close.

      Two thoughts:

      1) While everybody was oohing and ahhing about Google's IPO, Yahoo! very quietly went about purchasing some excellent search engine/caching outfits, like Inktomi and AllTheWeb, and, owing to the great dot-com bust, paid only pennies on the dollar in acquiring some outstanding talent and intellectual property.

      2) I think Google's been reading too many of their own press releases, and has been resting on their laurels for a few years now. And it doesn't help matters that their CEO, Eric Schmidt [cnn.com], is the same fella who damn near drove Novell to bankruptcy.

      • Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by coflow ( 519578 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @10:21PM (#13275838)
        I do think this is interesting to note, but I have to ask you as a business man, what matters more to you, the quality of the search or the number of people using the search engine. From anecdotal evidence, I can tell you that I maybe know of 3 or 4 people who use yahoo to search, and pretty much everybody else uses google or has firefox search toolbar set to google.

        I can make a better hamburger than McDonald's can, but you're probably better off investing in them than you are in me.

      • Re:My own - albeit anecdotal - experience... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @11:54PM (#13276175) Homepage
        Multiple search engines are probably the way to go, honestly, but here's some counter-anecdotal evidence.

        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:4, Informative)

        by Darkman, Walkin Dude ( 707389 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @06:06AM (#13277182) Homepage

        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.

  • Yahoo! playing Tortoise to Google's Hare (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ohmster ( 843198 ) * on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:45PM (#13275363) Homepage Journal
    It's interesting to see that Yahoo! may have surpassed Google on this metric. Over the past decade, Yahoo! has beaten other "hares" to date, including AOL and Microsoft's MSN. They're doing some innovative stuff, but also have some areas to catch up on. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/on_the_merits_o.htm l [blogs.com]

  • Great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:46PM (#13275366)
    Now all Yahoo has to do is create a real search engine that can actually spew out relevant results amongst those 20 billion entries...

  • Great... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lewisham ( 239493 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:46PM (#13275369)
    ...now it'll be even harder to find anything on Yahoo! Google keeps and holds its users because searches *work*. When I search for something, Google has a very high chance of giving me what I want in 4 pages or so. Yahoo! isn't as good at getting me the information I want. The problem might even be made *worse* with all these pages. Yahoo! has never said, AFAIK, how it ranks pages, but Google does it better. With this wealth of data, the ranking system is going to be under much more scrutiny at picking the right pages.

    • Re:Great... (Score:4, Informative)

      by donutello ( 88309 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:54PM (#13275417) Homepage
      Google keeps and holds its users because searches *work*.

      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.

      • Re:Great... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MacJedi ( 173 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:59PM (#13275443) Homepage
        It's been about 2 years since Google stopped returning useful results. Now, most of the results are crap.
        This has not, in general, been my experience. Can you give an example where a reasonable search yields results that are mostly "crap?"
        • Can you give an example where a reasonable [Google] search yields results that are mostly "crap?"
          .... to be continued... The previous posters are currently on google hitting page after page thinking, "I know there was something that returned "crap" ...

        • Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)

          by bedroll ( 806612 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:12PM (#13275514) Journal
          http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=crap&btnG=Goo gle+Search [google.com]

          had to do it, sorry..

        • Re:Great... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by AEton ( 654737 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:33PM (#13275614)
          Searching for information on digital cameras, especially less popular ones, often yields dozens of pages of sites that want to sell one and no descriptions of user experiences or reviews. (Even the manufacturers' own product description is usually hard to find.)

          This problem is not specific to digital cameras - it's endemic to any piece of hardware that the majority of the Internet is interested in selling rather than discussing. It's great that your Yahoo! Storefront and its twenty clones want to give me a great deal on the Flibbet Jibbet Cog, but I'd really like to know what people who use it think about it.

          (Occasionally some results with "flibbetyjibbit linux compatibility" will work - but never general product information!)
          • Stupid question time - are you only punching in the model numbers, or are you adding clarifying words like "manual", "review", or "experience"?

          • Re:Great... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by poofyhairguy82 ( 635386 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:10AM (#13276787) Journal
            Searching for information on digital cameras, especially less popular ones, often yields dozens of pages of sites that want to sell one and no descriptions of user experiences or reviews.

            Simple answer, put this in Google (or whatever):

            cameramodel review -checkout -buy -shipping

            Then get what you want. The engines can't read your mind. They don't know if you want to buy one, see a review for one, get a hack for one, sell one, etc.

        • Re:Great... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by skiflyer ( 716312 )
          I wouldn't call it useless... but certainlly not as useful as it used to be for me... this weekend I needed to learn how to countersink a screw.

          So I searched "how to countersink a screw"... and first a handful of links selling bits used in countersinking, then a page or two of links for how to projects which required the countersinking of a screw... then a few links about what a countersunk screw is... then I said screw it, this doesn't look so hard and I just did it... never found the link, but I'm sure i

        • Re:Great... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by rm999 ( 775449 )
          Many products that are electronical or computer related return terrible results. I either get a bunch of technical pages or commercial pages. For example, the motherboard on a computer I was fixing was malfunctioning. I was looking for a manual. The manufacturer's site was not on the first site. Instead, I found several pages where I could buy the product.

          I think an option in google that excludes sites with large data tables (technical sites) and prices (froogle sites) would be great. It would get me to pur
      • Sad, but entirely true.
      • It's been about 2 years since Google stopped returning useful results. Now, most of the results are crap.

        Have you noticed what's happened to the internet recently?

    • Unfortunately, I'm not quick enough to post something insightful, because you posted exactly what I would have.

      In fact, I rarely remember using Yahoo! Search, almost everything good I've ever found on there has been by browsing the directory. Fortunately for Yahoo! they have a decent amount of other useful content.

    • Can you please explain why exactly it is a bad thing that Yahoo! is attempting to improve their searches, and do you have some sort of explanation/proof of your implied correlation that Yahoo! results gets worse as it indexes more websites?

      Adding more potential hits is nothing but A Good Thing. The actual search itself might not be up to snuff with Google yet, however, adding more potential search hits it is nothing but an improvement. We should be excited that Yahoo! is upping the ante in any form. Jus

      • Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lewisham ( 239493 )
        I don't have any proof, it's all subjective. YMMV. Adding more potentional hits, however, is not guaranteed to make things better. It might makes things worse.

        Massive simplification: If you have a dataset that's twice as large, you're going to get twice as many pages that might be right. The searching mechanism will be under more difficulty trying to determine which is the best one to return and in what order it should be. This is going to really work the ranking algorithm, if its not up to snuff, its going
      • You have a lot of good points. Thing is it doesn't mean that it changes the relevance of the results. Not to mention that it's probably going to do little more than add results to my search that returns 200,000 hits, not the one that only returned 30 with none relevant. Then again, it may mean that I find that 31st hit with the rare tidbit that I was looking for...

        This just seems like the numbers game. The question is, who's listening? /.ers? Anyone else? This isn't like Intel with clock speeds, they're n

        • Thing is it doesn't mean that it changes the relevance of the results.

          Yes, absolutely - I'm merely saying that Yahoo! has topped Google in something, where as in the past few years they've basically been left in the dust. I applaud their efforts at improving and I'm glad that now Google will probably have to/want to do something about their number of sites to shut Yahoo! up, thus improving their service.

          Yes, you and I and the grandparent poster all know that throwing more sites at their search engine doesn
    • Google does not actually tell how it ranks its pages either. It's well known that PageRank is no longer the primary ingredient in Google's ranking algorithm, and the real mix of heuristics and methods is kept a trade secret. So if you're going to compare Yahoo and Google, they are both black boxes with only secret customer feedback influencing their algorithms. If Yahoo do have twice the number of indexed pages, they have a potential advantage provided their algorithms are up to it.
      • But we *do* know PageRank improves as the dataset does. But yes, you are right, both are essentially black boxes. My main point is this isn't necessarily such a great thing.

  • Googlebot is not very aggressive on internal links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:49PM (#13275388)
    We recently launched a mobile search engine [mwtj.com]. The domain was registered, pages created, etc, so I'm observing it go from zero page rank, to having a page rank and getting crawled. Yahoo's bot definitely crawls more frequently, and Googlebot doesn't seem to crawl any links unless they are linked to from external pages. I assume that as the pagerank increases, Googlebot will get more aggressive, but from what I can see in the logs it's clear that Googlebot takes a "wait and see" approach to crawling.

    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.

  • More important (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:49PM (#13275389) Homepage
    A newsflash that's more important to me is how, years ago, Google passed Yahoo's abillity to display relevant results.

    Why isn't programmer efficiency measured in KLOCs? Because quality is more important than quantity when used as the only metric.

    • Why isn't programmer efficiency measured in KLOCs?

      I didn't even know that Kangaroo's had Libraries of Congress, let alone used it as a measurement.

  • Quantity versus quality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IamGarageGuy 2 ( 687655 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:49PM (#13275394) Journal
    I don't believe that volume of pages is really a relevant metric to be used in the case of search results. With an infinite number of pages the real metric comes down to relevance.
  • I've found that yahoo! slurp is almost always my most frequent visitor to my websites.

  • Hey Yahoo (Score:3, Informative)

    by Spackler ( 223562 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:55PM (#13275422) Journal
    It's not the size of the boat...
    it's the motion of the ocean.


  • 20 billion documents, I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)

    by baylanger ( 780885 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:57PM (#13275437)
    Are those 20 billion documents, the actual SPAMs I received at my yahoo mail account since 1994?

  • 95% of which is crap (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkCanuck ( 751748 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @08:59PM (#13275448)
    • useless blogs and geocities "websites": 12 billion
    • clipart, midi and hideous backgrounds for above websites: 6 billion
    • links to outdated or expired user sessions: 1 billion
    • real content: 1 billion, if lucky
    The only thing I ever use Yahoo for is if and when my internet connection seems slow or dead I ping yahoo.com. It's just been a habit since the 90's.

    • Re:95% of which is crap (Score:3, Informative)

      by danila ( 69889 )
      This blog post [raelity.org] (and especially the comments) discusses pinging yahoo.com, the switch to pinging google and what else do other people ping.

      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. :)
  • It's ironic that 20 billion just happens to be the VERY SAME number of links on www.yahoo.com... hmm, coincidence?

    Jerry
    http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]
  • I have always found Yahoo searches too "commerce heavy," leaning way to much to "Yahoo stores" and "Yahoo sites." The meaningful info is lost in the jumble. Google results are cleaner and easier to parse. So, more Yahoo results equals more furustrating/confusing results.

    I'll stick with Google, thank you.

  • If Google wants to survive in the long run, they will need to stop playing favorites based on political ideology. They give, IMO, too much lee way for their adsense and google news people to restrict access. One blogger I know of was rejected as a "racist" because she questioned whether Nelson Mandela really should be called a hero. The irony of it is that my blog is far more politically incorrect than hers and AdSense for some reason accepted me. I wrote a letter to Google about the behavior of their AdSen [blindmindseye.com]

    • Re:Google needs to become mature like Yahoo (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In other news, some guy wrote a Slashdot post and linked to his own blog. Woah, shocker. 9_9

    • What on earth? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Monday August 08, 2005 @10:45PM (#13275950) Homepage
      So.. Yahoo is mature and Google is not because Google's news service reprints many and varied websites-- but not some of the "blogs" you like-- and Yahoo's news service reprints Reuters? I'm not entirely sure what's going on here but it sounds like you are misinterpreting some kind of personal poor experience with Google's sales department as an actual problem.

      Google and Yahoo news do not even offer remotely the same kind of service, nor are the services equal in importance. Yahoo News is almost closer to the core of Yahoo's service than even the search; Google News is more auxiliary from Google's perspective, and I don't think they're even getting much money off of them.

      Anyway, frankly IMO "blogs" shouldn't be on google news anyway. Period. If I wanted a blog aggregator, I'd go to a blog aggregator. Google News is a news aggregator. The difference may mostly be only in terms of what the aggregated sites choose to identify themselves as, but that's enough of a difference for me.

      As for AdSense, the categories based on which things can get classified as inappropriate for AdSense are extremely broad and if you're expecting close attention paid to border cases, I think you're expecting things of the service that the service never intended. And if the person your complaint here concerns is Michelle Malkin...? Well, from what I've read of her stuff, if you're trying to defend her against accusations of racism then some article about Nelson Mandela would be only the tiniest part of the problem.

      Don't be surprised if in a few more years of broadband development, that Yahoo is able to position itself as an alternative to many cable TV providers.

      Wait, wasn't this exact same prediction being batted around, like, five to seven years ago? And didn't it fail to work out then either? [clickz.com] Hm, you are a blogger, aren't you.
  • (1) Take search, submit to multiple different engines (2) Rank sites among results (3) Ad Google ads and spit back out (4) Profit!

  • Several interpretations (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:13PM (#13275518) Homepage
    I read this in one of two ways:

    a) Yahoo crawler is not as discriminating as google, collecting loads of garbage and mirrored sites

    or

    b) Google is finally falling behind the Web. In the past every snazy search engine eventually got overwhelmed by web growth and fell beihnd. Has that time arrived for Google?

    On a different note I've heard a rumor that Google's total CPU count across all its server sites is fast approaching a million. If this is true, talk about barriers to entry! Anyone out there who can confirm or deny this?

  • It's true, and easy to check... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NotQuiteReal ( 608241 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:13PM (#13275522) Journal
    I did a search for "a" on both Google and Yahoo.

    Results:

    Google: "1-10 of about 3,120,000,000 .06 sec"
    Yahoo: "1-10 of about 11,300,000,000 .08 sec"

    Top yahoo hit - some punk band. Top Google hit, apple .com.

    Gee, who do you think will make more money with those results... ;-)

    • But I find the 11.3 Billion hits for Yahoo an odd coincidence, given that the /. story mentions 11.3 billion for Google ...

      Maybe the editors need to check on something, or we all ought to count 11.3 billion as the "new 42".

    • Does this mean that the other 9,000,000,000 pages on the internet don't have the letter 'a' in them?

      I tried searching for "a OR e OR i OR o OR u OR y" but actually got about 1/3 less results on each. How does that happen?

  • Big Increase - Simple Explanation (Score:5, Funny)

    by ndansmith ( 582590 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:23PM (#13275572)
    The increase can be explained by Yahoo adding Slashdot dupes to their index.

  • In Soviet Russia... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    from google:
    Results 1 - 10 of about 3,930 for "In Soviet Russia" slashdot.org

    from Yahoo!:
    Results 1 - 10 of about 11,300 for "In Soviet Russia" slashdot.org - 0.38 sec.

     

    Looks convincing to me, comrades!

  • Frigidaire effect (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fishbowl ( 7759 )
    Even when you use "Yahoo" to search for something,
    you're still googling it. Just like xeroxing on a Canon, or putting food in the frigidaire (even if it's a Kelvinator.)

    Google has this kind of brand identity, for good or for worse. This is a status that both Napster and Tivo almost acheived, but fizzled just in time to escape the phenomenon.

  • Google vs. Yahoo crawl frequency (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flinxmeister ( 601654 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @09:53PM (#13275722) Homepage
    I've noticed that Yahoo's crawl visits my site more frequently...but Google's crawl seems to be intelligent about how often it crawls.

    If I update alot, google crawls more. Yahoo doesn't seem to care.

    So all these folks talking about yahoo being better may be off the mark. Why crawl all the time when you can only crawl when necessary?
  • cause that would rock.
  • So how come the current /. poll has been archived? It their comment database full up or something?

    No wait.

  • when's the last time you've actually used Yahoo to *search* for something? Yeah, I thought so.

  • I've got Results as to why I prefer Google: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @11:29PM (#13276101) Journal
    OK: I did a brain fart search on both engines. The word? Kyzyl. It's the capital of Tuva. Tuva is an obscure little suburb of Mongolia. Yep. When you think your stupid relatives who bought a place in Indiana live in the middle of Nowhere, you're wrong. Tuva Is The Middle Of Nowhere.

    So, In Firefox tab A, I have Google and tab B is Yahoo. Both searched on Kyzyl.

    Results (pleae pay attention because htmling this was a pain...):

    Yahoo's first 5 entries:

    * All Russia Hotels All Russian Hotels - We offer discount hotel reservation services online in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Russia, Ukraine, CIS and Baltic. www.allrussiahotels.com [allrussiahotels.com]

    * Tuva Travel Kyzyl city is the capital of Tuva Republic (Russia) Kyzyl city is positioned right in the center of Asia, which is proudly claimed by a local monument specifically dedicated to this fact. www.sokoltours.com [sokoltours.com]

    WEB RESULTS

    1. Wikipedia: Kyzyl
    Open this result in new window
    Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia's article on 'Kyzyl' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyzyl [slashdot.org]

    - More from this site - Save - Block

    2. Weather Underground: Kyzyl, Russia Forecast
    Open this result in new window Find the Weather for any City, State or ZIP Code, or Airport Code or Country. Email. Password. Maps. United States. International. Information. Refinance Rates. GoTo Meeting. Kyzyl Singles. Hosting Companies. Online deals! Vitamins. Internet Mall ... Updated: 8:00 AM KRAST on August 02, 2005. Observed at Kyzyl, Russia (History) Elevation: 2064 ft / 629 m ... Coming soon: Flash Stickers. Kyzyl, 63 F / 17 C ...
    www.wunderground.com/global/stations/36096.html
    - 64k - Cached - More from this site - Save - Block

    3. AllRefer.com - Kyzyl (CIS And Baltic Political Geography) - Encyclopedia
    Open this result in new window

    3. AllRefer.com reference and encyclopedia resource provides complete information on Kyzyl, CIS And Baltic Political Geography. Includes related research links. ... By Alphabet : Encyclopedia A-Z - K. Kyzyl, CIS And Baltic Political Geography ... Kyzyl or Kizil[both: kizil'] Pronunciation Key, city (1989 pop ...
    reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/K/Kyzyl [allrefer.com]
    More from this site - Save - Block

    Now, for the first five Google Results on Kyzyl:

    Kyzyl'-administrative center of Republic of Tuva, Russia Kyzyl' Republic of Tuva,
    |Central-Chernozemny| ... Republic Capital:, Kyzyl. Capital Population:, 91000( at 01/01/94) ...
    members.tripod.com/~argun/kyzyl.htm [tripod.com]
    - 5k - Cached - Similar pages

    Kyzyl on Encyclopedia.com
    Kyzyl or Kizilboth: kzl, city (1989 pop. 85000), capital of Tuva Republic, S Siberian Russia, on the Yenisei River. It services motor transport and has ...
    www.encyclopedia.com/html/K/Kyzyl.asp [encyclopedia.com]
    - 47k - Cached - Similar pages

    Kyzyl Travel Information. Photos, Stories and Diaries about Kyzyl
    Sustainable Tourism for independent travellers (travelers) and backpackers. www.worldsurface.com/browse/location.asp?locationi d=5654 [worldsurface.com]
    - 59k - Cached - Similar pages

    Kyzyl, Tuva, Russia current local time
    Kyzyl, Tuva, Russia - before placing a telephone call or making travel plans for a flight or hotel, get the current local time provided by ...
    www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_RU-TY.aspx ?city=Kyzyl [worldtimeserver.com]
    - 17k - C

    • AFAIK, Tuva is part of Russia, not Mongolia.

      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.

    • How about a search for mortgage [google.com] on Google. Hmmm, this looks familiar. The two top results seem to be sponsored links instead of real results. Does "this [infer] that commerce puts people above the law"" on Google?

  • The Search Engine Size Game (Score:3, Informative)

    by vicaya ( 838430 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:22AM (#13276810)

    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:

    • "Acid Brass" stockport - yahoo:20 google:24
    • "anetan district" - yahoo:17 google:15
    • "chunder blunder" - yahoo:25 google:27
    • "information theoretical death" - yahoo:45 google:46
    • kliningan juru - yahoo:27 google:47
    • "phylogenetic organisms" - yahoo:5 google:10
    • zibelthiurdos thrace - yahoo:9 google:4

    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!

  • I am not surprised. (Score:4, Informative)

    by mrjb ( 547783 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @09:09AM (#13278139)
    Google refuses to index pages that aren't linked to by at least a gazillion other sites, submitted or not.
    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.

  • A faint voice (Score:3, Funny)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:39PM (#13281694) Journal
    Just then, a faint voice could be heard comming from Yahoo's headquarters...

    "I'm not dead yet..."

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