What if Google and Yahoo got into a fight?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Tim Finin <finin () cs umbc edu>
Date: August 15, 2005 5:29:41 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: What if Google and Yahoo got into a fight?


Yahoo and Google have been arguing about whose index is bigger.
The disagreement was touched off when Yahoo claimed [1] that its
index provided access to "over 20 billion items".  Google
demurred [2].  Researchers at the University of Illinois NCSA
just announced the results [5] an experiment designed to settle
the question.  Their scheme used a Perl program [3] to generate
over 10K random two word queries drawn from words in the the
ispell dictionary [4]. Comparing the number of results found by
each engine for these search queries identified a clear winner --
Google [5].

[1] http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html
[2] http://battellemedia.com/archives/001790.php
[3] http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/compare.txt
[4] http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/wordlist.txt
[5] http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html

--  
 Tim Finin, Prof Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Univ of  
Maryland,
 Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore MD 21250.  
finin () umbc edu
 +1-410-455-3522 fax:-3969 http://umbc.edu/~finin/ http:// 
ebiquity.umbc.edu/


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