When we do a search on Google or any other web search engine, the total number of results are generally listed in the top right corner. This count can help us determine the actual size of the search engine.
Just perform a simple search for common words (words that are probably found in every text document like "the", "a", "is", "of", "or") and you can roughly compute the size of the entire search index.
We did the above experiment with the three most popular search engines - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft owned MSN. Here are some very interesting stats about their index sizes:
» MSN looks like a new born baby. It indexes just 10% of content when compared with Google.
» Google indexes the largest number of web pages for any of the common words. Yahoo comes second but not close enough.
» For overlapping queries ["the" OR "is" OR "of" OR "in" OR "are" OR "a"], Google finds 25 Billion documents while Yahoo shows just 25 Million results. See screenshots below.
Related: Which is the most Honest Search Engine ?
Limitation: The above results are only for text documents like PDF, Word Files, XLS or HTML files. No images or audi-video content is included.
Just perform a simple search for common words (words that are probably found in every text document like "the", "a", "is", "of", "or") and you can roughly compute the size of the entire search index.
We did the above experiment with the three most popular search engines - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft owned MSN. Here are some very interesting stats about their index sizes:
» MSN looks like a new born baby. It indexes just 10% of content when compared with Google.
» Google indexes the largest number of web pages for any of the common words. Yahoo comes second but not close enough.
» For overlapping queries ["the" OR "is" OR "of" OR "in" OR "are" OR "a"], Google finds 25 Billion documents while Yahoo shows just 25 Million results. See screenshots below.
Related: Which is the most Honest Search Engine ?
Limitation: The above results are only for text documents like PDF, Word Files, XLS or HTML files. No images or audi-video content is included.