Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied Yahoo's claims of a 20 billion item index and found them lacking.
Neither Google nor Yahoo makes direct verification of their index claims available. But an Associate Director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and two researchers conducted a brief "(T)here are a number of cases in which Google returns dozens of results while Yahoo! only returns one or two results, or none at all," the researchers note in the study.
The average search results, excluding duplicates, was 38 to 14 in favor of Google. Including duplicates changed that average to 64 to 22. Out of the 10,012 tests, 9,676 had Google returning more results, 307 showed Yahoo did better, and 29 found both engines returning the same number.
Yahoo has disputed the results of the admittedly limited test.
"The study cannot be used to determine how many documents are in the index," Yahoo spokesman Aaron Ferstman said in a TechWeb.com article. "It can simply be used to see how well the index returns documents. What really matters ultimately is relevance."
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him
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Google 166.9 Percent Greater Than Yahoo!
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