Experts doubtful on Yahoo! Search Engine claims

Experts doubtful on Yahoo! Search Engine claims

The war between the search engines is going on with Google dominating the proceedings. The search engine giant is the world’s most used web based search engine and has been challenged by the renewed efforts from both Microsoft’s MSN Search Engine and Yahoo! Search Engine. One of the parameters these companies use to impress their users is the number of pages or items they have in their index available for search.

Google mentions around 8 Billion pages available for searches in their index with the total number of items coming close to about 11.2 billion items. These include images and other sections of the Internet they index. Yahoo! recently surprised everybody by unveiling that their own search engine indexes more than 20 Billion web based objects, which is around, double to that of their competitor’s availability.

However, now the researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications have claimed that the claims of the world’s most popular web portal seem to be far fetched. The research group consisted of Matthew Cheney, Mike Perry, and Orville Vernon Burton who studied the patterns of search results on both the search engines and came out with the finding that Google finds articles that are more relevant on randomly selected search keywords.

The researchers said in a statement: “It is the opinions of this study that Yahoo’s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google’s index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, we find it puzzling that Yahoo’s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google.”

During the testing, the researchers used particular keywords, which resulted in less than 1000 results. Reason being, both the search engines refuse to go forward after 1000 results have been displayed for a particular keyword. And they found that Google’s results were larger in number when compared to Yahoo! results.

Yahoo! on their part has responded and claims that the study is flawed in the way they have researched their findings. The company said: “The study cannot be used to determine how many documents are in the index. It can simply be used to see how well the index returns documents. What really matters ultimately is relevance.”

More Yahoo! News