eConsultant

The study's fundamental thesis, that the number of search results is an indication of the universe of the search, is very flawed.

A Comparision of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices:

Conclusions
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, we find it puzzling that Yahoo!'s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15, 2005 at 4:15 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.