Last week saw the resumption of the search engine size wars in which one major search engine claims to be larger than its rivals, prompting those rivals to rapidly upsize themselves. Yahoo fired the first round at Google, claiming to have over 20 billion objects accessible in their database. Google, which can only claim about 13 billion objects fired back with questions about measurements, basically stating Yahoo was mistaken or misleading in its claims.
WebProWorld Others got in on the act and the blog-o-sphere was full of stories about Yahoo's obsession with size. By the beginning of this week, the search marketing community was fed up with being fed tripe about the importance of size, as reflected August 16 th in Danny Sullivan's post to Search Engine Watch, " RustySearch an ongoing blind user-test of results drawn from a random Big4 search engine that is reminiscent of the Pepsi-Challenge. The RustyBrick site has posted National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois took up a study of results generated by Google and Yahoo in reaction to Tim Mayer's August 8 th post at the method pioneered by search legends Andrei Broder that samples the size of search results based on words derived from previous search queries. The NCSA study shows Google gives a greater number of results than Yahoo though it in no way intended to suggest those results are better or more relevant. In some ways, the results of the two studies seem to cancel each other out with Yahoo nosing ahead of Google in the first and Google squashing Yahoo in the second. Unfortunately, neither study offers a conclusive analysis of which search engine is the best. RustySearch provides data on which search results are considered most relevant, showing Yahoo and Google receiving similar relevancy ratings even though the NCSA study demonstrates Google returns far more results than Yahoo does. Perhaps the two studies combined show that Yahoo has better filters than Google does though that still does not show conclusively which is the better of the two. As their results appear to be relatively equally relevant, perhaps a measure of which is the best comes in overall usefulness to searchers and, ultimately to advertisers. The real interesting competition between all the major search engines is being waged on the battlefield of usefulness and user loyalty. This is the user-focused space in which one or more of the Big4 will eventually rise to dominate the various sectors of search. The question is, what is useful to search engine users? Over the past few years each of the major search engines has introduced a number of new tools that on their own might not seem to have a lot to do with organic search results but collectively have a lot to do with the business of search. For example, Google, Yahoo and MSN each offer sizable free email accounts to their users, some of whom like myself maintain addresses at all three. Google and Microsoft are sparring over satellite mapping technologies, expanding on the usefulness of maps in relation to local search users. Earlier this week, Google introduced John Battelle wrote an excellent review of improvements to Yahoo Local and their usefulness to Yahoo searchers. analysts speculating Yahoo is about to enter the VOIP cyber-phone market, a rumour Yahoo is Nielsen Net Ratings , the strategy seems to be working with Google, Yahoo, and MSN (which offer the greatest number of user-focused tools) leading the pack by a wide margin. Guess which of the three offers the most useful tools to the greatest number of searchers? Now, guess which of the three can offer the biggest distributed bang for an advertiser's buck. That's what our clients care about. Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager ofSuggest a Correction
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