Feb

The Yahoo – Google Battle – (Index) Size Matters!

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Battle, google, Index, Matters, Size, Yahoo

The Yahoo – Google Battle – (Index) Size Matters!

Yahoo got more pages indexed than Google. And an enormous amount
more. It seems that the Yahoo index is more than twice the size
of the Google index. Recently this was also announced by Yahoo,
even though they generally don’t comment on index sizes.

However, a simple search for the word âthe’ in both engines
shows a huge difference. Where Google comes up with approx.
3,320,000,000 results, Yahoo spits out the huge amount of
10,200,000,000 results.

Ungoogle like, a couple of weeks later Google responded. Not by
word, but in silence. An enormous crawl of the net was performed
and even though it still says âSearching 8,168,684,336 web
pages’ on the google home page, it is obvious that they have
indexed a lot more pages.

These new pages actually were ignored by Google before but it
seems that the spider rules of google have been changed in order
to increase the index. Obviously this could not happen
unnoticed. And noticing it we did. Many sites are seeing reduced
traffic since Friday, August 19th, 2005.

Considering that Google has special rules for newly indexed
pages, (Simply said: no PR so PR is not taken into account when
determining the position of the page*) you can see lots of PR0
pages rank high that weren’t there before. Some of the sites I
monitor show a decrease in traffic of about 20 to 30%. If Google
indexed about 20 to 30% more pages then this explains the
decrease in traffic. These new pages get found, but the number
of searches has not increased. In other words, the amount of
traffic Google generates now is spread over 20 to 30% more
pages. High ranking sites lose traffic (especially content rich
sites) to all these new pages that have been indexed. In a next
PR update this lost traffic should be recovered partly I
believe, though all these new pages also contain new links so it
is a swag (Silly Wild Ass Guess) to predict what will happen in
the next PR update.

It is interesting to see how Google now made the fairly
commercial decision to respond to Yahoo’s increased index. A
leader sometimes needs to punch a challenger in the face in
order to maintain the respect of the group. They did this,
though for now it seems to be just a small punch, which makes me
believe we can expect more from Google.

*Controversial, not generally accepted, theory of mine.