Google Says: Index Size Does Matter

Now that they ore once again boasting the biggest, Google says that index size does matter. The beauty of it is that they are too cool to come out and say the number:

But can we prove it?
Yes, but even better, you can prove it yourself. The basic test for search engine comprehensiveness is whether you can find uncommon information. Popular queries return millions of results, but even the most obsessive searcher isn’t about to surf a few million pages, or even a tiny fraction of them; in most of these cases, you’ll either quickly find what you’re looking for or refine your search to be more focused.

So there you have it. Google says their index can beat up yours. Who cares. We know it’s all about relevancy.

Update: Graywolf has more:

[L]ets give Google a few quick tests to see how things work out.

search for the term [the] 9.2 billion results

ok great but there are all sorts of pages that don’t have the word [the] on it for example what about flash pages. Well that’s where it gets pretty simple we’ll just do a nice little negative search for all of the pages that don’t have the word [-the] and we end up with 1.3 billion pages which gives us about 10.5 billion pages. Not highly scientific but a good estimate, but looking at google’s recent explanation you’ll notice this sentance:

To see for yourself, try searching for something very specific

Clearly [the] and [-the] don’t meet this criteria, so lets search for something very specific like [triskadecahedron lycanthropy]. Well that certainly is specific, in fact it’s so specific there are zero results. So if none of the documents contain those terms, logically all of the documents are in the opposite set, so lets look for [-triskadecahedron -lycanthropy] and we get 9.58 billion results. Now of course when you work with multiple terms sometimes things get a little funny so lets try it with quotes [-”triskadecahedron lycanthropy”] nope still 9.58 billion results.

While it’s quite vogue to pick on google nowadays, lets look at the exact same searches on yahoo

Yahoo [the] 10.9 billion results
Yahoo [-the] 0 results
Yahoo [triskadecahedron lycanthropy] 0 results
Yahoo [-triskadecahedron -lycanthropy] 0 results
Yahoo [-”triskadecahedron lycanthropy”] 0 results

While there are problems with this kind of cursory research, it seems to be pretty solid as to what the average Joe can do to check size.