p2pnet.net News:- Yahoo and Google are engaged in an intriguing “Mine is bigger than Yours,” battle.

The former says its search engine index now takes in more than 20 billion Web documents and images – close to double that of the latter.

But, “Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, suggested that the Yahoo index was inflated with duplicate entries in such a way as to cut its effectiveness despite its large size,” says the New York Times.

"The comprehensiveness of any search engine should be measured by real Web pages that can be returned in response to real search queries and verified to be unique," he’s quoted as saying. "We report the total index size of Google based on this approach."

But Jeff Weiner, senior vp of Yahoo’s search and marketplace group, retorts, "The number of documents in our index is accurate."

On Sunday, National Center for Supercomputer Applications researchers performed a large number of random searches on both indices, says the NYT, going on, "They ran a random sample of 10,012 queries and concluded that Google, on average, returned 166.9 percent more results than Yahoo. In only three percent of the cases did the Yahoo searches return more queries than Google. The group said the Yahoo index claim was suspicious."

"It’s a little bit silly," the story has Christopher Manning, a Stanford University professor who teaches a course on information retrieval, saying.

"It’s difficult, and the whole question of how big indexes are has clearly become extremely political and commercial."

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See:-
20 billion – Yahoo overtakes Google, p2pnet, August 9, 2005
New York Times – In Silicon Valley, a Debate Over the Size of the Web, August 14, 2005

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