Google vs. Yahoo - Measuring Indices

[hesperus]

No surprise, but interesting. The study focuses on results of less than a thousand returns -- the hard to find queries. Yahoo is clearly fudging.

Based on the data created from our sample searches, this study concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results.

It is the opinion of this study that Yahoo!'s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google's index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine or if the Yahoo! search engine is not returning all the documents that match our specific search queries, we find it puzzling that Yahoo!'s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google.

http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html
National Centre For Supercomputing Applications

[hesperus]

A take on relevancy of results with some other reading:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3527636
Search Engine Watch

[Aspman]

El Reg has a take on this also

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08...le_yahoo_junk/

The Argentian writer Borges described the Falklands War as "two bald men fighting over a comb", and it's an apt description for the spectacle of the search engines, and their rival supporters, duking it out to bost who's has collected the most garbage.

[Kthln01]

i use yahoo more than google for searches