SEO Blog

While I was writing my post on search engine index sizes, Murray walked in, moaning about the lottery - “All the numbers drawn were one off from my picks”

Oh well. Made me think though; What are popular numbers?

I noticed in our stats last week, people arriving at the site search using search queries such as “2″, and “8″. For fun, here’s a query I ran for the numbers 0 - 10 (don’t argue that 0 is not a number please, I never understood that one), and how many documents Google Yahoo and MSN all list for them.

Some other important numbers I chose to query; and the #1 result:

8,168,684,336 (number of web pages in Google’s index according to their home page)

Google:
MCNGP Acceptance Speech [Episode 8168684336] (collect all 8168684336)
Offers Free MCSE braindumps and Microsoft software forum.
www.mcse.ms/message1808562.html - 38k - Cached - Similar pages

As everyone with half a brain online already knows, the search engines are almost falling over each other in the race to provide the best results to their customers. While I was in San Jose at the Search Engine Strategies conference in August, Yahoo! announced that their index had just reached 20 billion documents.

Ever since then, there has been a ton of speculation around their claim to have the biggest index. A Google engineer I had the chance to listen to while at Google’s offices commented that Google is trying to remove all duplicate content from their database, which means that as it expands, it’s also being paired down. His suggestion: Perhaps Yahoo! was counting with the duplication filters turned off. ( ? )