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Tuesday 27th September 2005

Google wags index at rivals 12:04PM, Tuesday 27th September 2005

Google has marked its seventh birthday, by claiming that it has expanded its index of web pages to become three times larger than any other search engine. But the company also insists that numbers alone are not the true measure of search success, and remains coy about the exact size of the new index.

Google is locked in a search battle with Yahoo! who had previously claimed to index the largest number of Web pages (19.2 billion Web documents as opposed to Google's 8 billion Web pages). But much as with the microprocessor battle between Intel and AMD, where simple clock speed is no longer viewed an indication of chip power, so the search giants are insisting the quality of their search results lie in the sophistication of their sorting

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techniques rather than the sheer number of pages scanned.

In this vein, Google is challenging users to put the new index to the test. In the Google blog Software Engineer Anna Patterson, has posted: 'Come up with a search query that's special to you (your name, your elementary school, and your favourite animal, for example) - a combination of words that is likely to exist on just a few web pages out of the billions we've indexed, a few needles scattered in the Internet's endless haystack. Ready?'

The announcement coincides with Google's seventh birthday, hence the accompanying characteristic graphic.

According to the company, the newly expanded web search index is 1,000 times the size of the 1998 original.

Alun Williams

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