Does size really matter?

Among search engines, size definitely matters--at least when comparing the the number of pages indexed.

Yesterday Google boasted "searching 8,168,684,336 Web pages," on their website. This will be the last time we will have the pleasure of seeing this dubious claim on the Google homepage – it will be removed shortly.

Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said the company is going to remove the search statistic from its home page because of controversy over the way these services count pages. (Last month, for instance, Yahoo! claimed that it was indexing a whopping 19.2 billion pages--three times as many as Google). In response, Schmidt says Google is way ahead of Yahoo! when it comes to unduplicated pages searched. And so on and so forth--blah, blah, blah.

Yahoo! and Google, here's my message to you: I could not care less about the size of your search index--just give me the result set! More power to Google if they can give me the right information in 3x less index size than Yahoo!

Index size does not matter, the pleasure I get from the result set does.