Of Course Size Matters!

I've been trying to stay out of the size debate for the last few days while I digest what others have been saying. Now that I've done that, I get to react to a few of the things I've been reading. A Rhetorical Question First off all, many people are suddenly crying "size doesn't matter!" and that doesn't smell right. If size really doesn't matter, then why didn't anyone jump on Google for having that counter ("Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages") on their home page for so long? They have one of the most sparse home pages around but seem to believe it's important enough to waste a few bytes with that number. We all know that number is [BS] anyway, right? When's the last time it changed? Oh, right. When MSN Search declared a larger number. Search Engine Relevancy Challenge aims to quantify which service produces better results. If you I knew it was going to be one of those days when the linked on Slashdot. As I expected, the slashdot herd jumped for joy at the chance to prove Yahoo wrong and hold Google up as the reigning champ of web search and all things non-evil. But I didn't see anyone look very closely at the methodology or source code). As This page (the #1 result) no longer contains the target phrase. So you check when we hit the 1 billion mark in images: "Yes, size does matter. But only if you know how to use it. ;-)" May the best engine win! Update: Someone just poitned out that Yahoo! Search now returns a few results for that query--both from Steh's blog. I guess this is more of a this post might be interesting too. You can also things to consider when trying to measure index sizes. Links: See what others are saying Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Jeremy Zawodny's blog