Phil Bradley's Blog

Thursday, November 11, 2004

 
Information on the increased size of the Google database is available in the Google Blog and the news is that they have almost doubled the size of their index up to 8 billion pages. This is obviously in direct response to the launch of the MSN Search beta (more on that below), which has 5 billion pages, so we're into Macho Search Posturing at the moment. 8 billion pages is nice, but does it actually mean a lot? For many people it simply means that they're going to get even more results from the searches that they run. What's more important in my view is that the search engine provides accurate responses that give the enquirer what they're looking for. I want a good top ten results, and I don't care about the rest, however many there are.

Doubling the size of the index simply means that there's a lot more that I won't be looking at. Of course, if this means that I do get better results in the top ten that's fine, but if that's the case it would have been nice if Google could have provided these earlier; quite clearly doubling the size of the database and making it available today is clearly designed to try and draw attention away from the MSN Beta Search launch (it isn't going to work!), so they've been working on this for some time. Their interest is (obviously) in battling it out with Microsoft, with users of their engine coming in very second place.
Phil 9:37 AM