Google’s amazing expanding index
The search engine size war in review:
- August 21, 2003: Overture announces that their FAST search engine indexes 3.2 billion documents.
- August 27, 2003: Google updates its site to indicate that it searches 3.3 billion documents.
- February 18, 2004: Yahoo announces its new search engine.
- February 18, 2004: Google expands its index to 6 billion items.
- November 10, 2004: Google announces an expanded index of over 8 billion items.
- November 11, 2004: Microsoft debuts its new MSN search engine, indexing 5 billion documents.
Anyone who works with large databases knows that “number of items” can be a very vague concept. Google’s number of items could vary depending on whether they decide to include or reject things like duplicates, obvious spam, malformed pages, newly crawled pages, and so on. Considering that they must index millions of new pages every day, it amuses me greatly that the “number of pages” at the bottom of the search page only changes when it’s convenient for marketing purposes.
New MSN Search algorythm could do with a tweak So, Microsoft/MSN have launched their new search engine (in beta).
After the initial problem of their servers being overloaded with “please come back later” messages I managed to perform a few test searches.
Well, having had a play with some ke…
ummmmm interesting last comment!
Good to see that G & M$ are concentrating on quality, Not! Small indexes with quality info would be the way forward, forget 8 billion pages of dross… I’ve read them and they are,nothing but. Get a grip!!!!! ,