What if Google and Yahoo got into a fight?
Tim Finin, 4:18pm 15 August 2005Yahoo and Google have been arguing about whose index is bigger. The disagreement was touched off when Yahoo claimed that its index provided access to “over 20 billion items”. Google demurred. Researchers at the University of Illinois NCSA just announced the results of an experiment designed to settle the question. Their scheme used a Perl program that generated over 10K random two word queries drawn from the ispell dictionary. Comparing the number of results found by each search engine for these queries identified a clear winner. See their report for the results.
Ebiquity Blog
August 16th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
[...] Several people have pointed out some interesting issues in the methodology used to estimate whether Google or Yahoo has indexed more documents. [...]