This is what I would probably call tough business...What Google had been doing lately is amazing...The latest buzz in the slashdot circles is that, Google might be offering Wi-Fi access to entire America for free- or is it just the tip of the Ice-berg....When everyone, including me, were very much thinking of the Google's rise as the death bell for Microshit, Google seems to have very different plans...But the decision, if it is true, would have it's own business sense...

The move(if at all, to provide web access), is really nice. This would free Google from the clutches of the middle men between Google and the ISPs. The transit fees that Google pays the middlemen in the traffic routing services, to connect the user to it's servers, is high and services like GMail(which in itself is a bandwidth guzzler), Google Earth(this just sucks the bandwidth..try that with a dial-up and I am sure you would hate Google for whatever it is!!!!) take up so much of bandwidth, that the transit fees that Google pays to the third party is not un-considerable.

Also of interest is Yahoo! announcing that it has the largest index in the world..

"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."

- Source: The Official Yahoo! Blog

That was in their own words, and the index is more than twice that Google had managed till now!
In the Internet search space, though anyone can claim to give accurate results, their ability to scan through numerous documents is a factor that is considered critical..it is akin to the hide and seek that children play...the more vast and wide spread your search is, higher is your probability in finding the person you are seeking...it is same here...the more number of pages you index, it is assumed that your search result would be more accurate.

Though nothing can be more far from truth. It is undeniable that the number of indexed pages affect the search results, but indexing alone is not any measure of the search efficiency. The ultimate efficiency of a search engine is giving the exact answer to the query. But this is easier said than done. For example, the search string "Rose" can mean two(or even three or more!!) completely different things to different people. For instance:

1. A guy searching for the most exquisite rose to gift his Girl.
2. A botany student searching for the botanical names of the plant and the flower.
3. A movie buff, searching for Kate Winslet with the name of the Titanic heroine.

A search engine, to be most accurate, should be able to identify what the user has in mind and throw results that match his search criterion. This can be called Intelligent search. Yahoo! is already in it with Y!Q, and there are multiple smaller players in the field. But what Google did with the Adwords is to completely overhaul this space and provide revenue generating model. There is still a long way to go...

But returning to the main point of this post, an independent inquiry and analysis of the claim of Yahoo! to have indexed more pages than anyone else and thus imply a more accurate search result(atleast to the unsuspecting users of the net, for whom, size always matters), had revealed that it is not to be so. Though Yahoo! never claimed that the more number of pages it indexs, the better is the search result, that exactly is the view they wanted to spread. But that had been contested in this report. (Via Slashdot)

The report is open for everyone(ofcourse, who know the stuff) to interpret and verify the methodology.