Google Index Size vs Yahoo Claim

The size wars continue between the search engines with the latest salvo fired by Google claiming their index is bigger by three times than anyone else. But Google has now removed the "8,451,321,123 pages indexed" from their home page because they claim, "people don't necessarily agree on how to count it," according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

So now Yahoo will have to resort to simply childish banter each time they increase the index size.

Yahoo says, "Mine is bigger than yourrrrr-rrs! Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!"

Google says, "No it's not! Ours is the biggest in the whole wide world!"

Yahoo the replies, (...)

Well enough of that, says Google. "Use unique search phrases enclosed in quotes and run that query at both search engines to see who returns the most results!"

It's true and I agree - as do the majority of the searching public. Google returns more results more often with fresher pages indexed. You can't deny it if you simply take a look yourself and compare.

But Danny Sullivan wants them to look at ways to measure relevancy and I agree there as well. Most SEO's will concur.

I'm going to continue to point to traffic stats that show far more visits from Google referred searches on client sites I monitor traffic for. Google refers easily twice, sometimes triple, and often even 5 times the traffic referred from searches as any other engine including Yahoo. THAT is the relevance test to businesses who hire SEO's to increase their traffic.

Increasing rank in Yahoo leads to negligible traffic gains. Increasing rank in Google leads to dramatic traffic gains. What does the website owner do? Seek more organic referral traffic from Google. How? Content creation, aggregation, optimization for their own site, and distribution of content to external sites as linking strategy.

Sullivan says "Screw Size!" and I say "Give me referral traffic!"