The size of the web — and other imaginary numbers

My first acquaintance with imaginary numbers in real life came in high school when I learned all about i.

The continuing debate between Yahoo and Google about who indexes more of the web misses the point: both miss most of it.

The stuff search engines find is the tip of the iceberg.

Most of what's out there is known and available only to those who know where to go in the first place.

This past Monday John Markoff, the nonpareil tech reporter for the New York Times, wrote a story about the ongoing Yahoo v. Google "mine is bigger" back–and–forth.

Yahoo two weeks ago announced that its search engine indexes 19.2 billion documents.

Google's latest number is 8.1 billion.

So Yahoo should be far more useful than Google, right?

Well, maybe not.

Sergei Brin, Google's co–founder, said that Yahoo cheats by inflating its numbers with duplicate entries.

Also, Markoff noted that some experts believe that index size may be inversely related to the quality of search results, making smaller better.

Last Sunday researchers at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications had a kind of battle of the search engines and ran a random sample of about 10,000 searches on both Yahoo and Google.

They found that Google returned 166.9% more results than Yahoo.

In only 3% of the 10,000+ searches did Yahoo return more results.

The scientists concluded that the Yahoo claim was "suspicious."

Well, let's look at things from a few other vantage points.

First, the same issue of the Times published a table showing the relative frequency with which various search engines were used during the four weeks between July 10 and August 6.

The results:

1. google.com--------------59.5%

2. search.yahoo.com------28.5%

3. search.msn.com---------5.5%

4. ask.com-------------------3.3%

5. search.aol.com-----------0.9%

Now let's get a little closer to home: how about a look at which search engines bring people to bookofjoe?

At the top of this post is a representative snapshot and it's quite clear to me that Google is overwhelmingly the search vehicle of choice.

Even if you discount the Google image search numbers it's still 292 v. 49: that's nearly a 6:1 preference, even more dominant for Google than the survey above from the Times.

Finally, when I try searches on both Yahoo and Google, as I do from time to time, it's always a clear win for Google — by a mile.