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.
|
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 |
Google 490,000,000 1,720,000,000 1,400,000,000 1,190,000,000 909,000,000 1,070,000,000 862,000,000 840,000,000 853,000,000 743,000,000 1,020,000,000 |
MSN |
Yahoo! Search fails!!! 8,680,000,000 7,370,000,000 6,400,000,000 5,760,000,000 5,710,000,000 4,730,000,000 4,520,000,000 4,270,000,000 3,820,000,000 5,990,000,000 |
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
MSN:
Google
… effort . Advertising Programs – Business Solutions – About Google ©2005 Google – Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages
www.google.com
Yahoo:
Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages
… Google Search News. Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages …
Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages (8,000,000,000 of which have been penalized or are
www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/30709.htm -
Looks like MSN was the most accurate there.
Next Query: “19.2 billion web documents” (the number Yahoo! uses to describe its index)
Google:
Yahoo! Search blog: Our Blog is Growing Up – And So Has Our Index
… for those who are curious this update includes just over 19.2 billion web
documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. …
www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html – 51k – 4 Sep 2005
MSN:
Yahoo! Search blog: Our Blog is Growing Up – And So Has Our Index
… of a search engine), for those who are curious this update includes
just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over
50 million audio and video files. Note that as with all index …
www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html
Yahoo!:
Yahoo! Search blog: Our Blog is Growing Up – And So Has Our Index
… post, we’ve seen some discussion from webmasters who have noticed more
of their documents in our index … includes just over 19.2 billion web documents,
1.6 billion images, and over …
www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html - 52k
All good there.
One thing I noted was MSN search is fast. The result appeared faster than I could bat my eye. Google was fast, but not quite as fast. Yahoo! took the longest. Anecdotally, they were a lot slower. I didn’t have a stopwatch with me, but if MSN took less than 1/9 of a second, and Google 1/2 of a second, Yahoo! took about 3 to 4 seconds. That was fast in 2000, but slow by today’s terms. It may be a connection issue, but the results through these 30 queries were consistent.
I’m shocked / can’t believe how fast MSN search was.
So what does this mean for choosing lottery numbers? #1 is the most popular number on earth, followed by #2. But a zero is a failure only in the world of Yahoo!
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