Almost unnoticed in Google’s disclosure that its index is triple that of the nearest competitor is that they’re speaking to Cnet again.
Google turned seven recently, and the party mood must be infectious at the Googleplex. Remember that year-long ban Google imposed on talking to anyone associated with Cnet News? Looks like a year is two months in Google Time (beta*):
“We’re celebrating our seventh birthday…. We had a pretty strong year,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with Cnet News.com….”And we’ve sort of been struggling here with respect to the index. It has always been much larger than the others.”
“We’re announcing tonight that in terms of unduplicated pages our index is now three times larger than any other search engine,” he said, without saying how many pages are in the index.
Mr. Schmidt also disclosed in the chat with his new friends at Cnet that the Google home page will no longer display how many pages are in the index. The number of items in an index has been a point of contention, as Google and Yahoo have both claimed to have a greater number than the other.
Reuters quotes Danny Sullivan as agreeing that the focus on index counting wasn’t really much help to users:
“Users will be the best judge of which search engine is the most appropriate,” Sullivan said.
“The fact that you have picked up more content in a particular search result doesn’t mean you have found better information. It just means you have found more pages.”
*(To the best of Murdok’ knowledge, Google is not working on any project called Google Time. It’s funny, laugh.)
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
