But consider Amazon. For any given item on Amazon, there are about 1000 different urls that will take you to that same item. Affiliate links, lookups by ASIN, ISBN, combinations of all of the above, etc – they all effectively represent the same page as long as no redirects were involved, right? Amazon’s certainly not alone in this regard, there’s bazillions of other sites that do similar things. The search engine index could count each version as a seperate entry, or it can be sophisticated and count it as one page somehow, or it can ignore pages with query strings in them entirely and pretend that mod_rewrite doesn’t exist. The search engines all seem to do different things, so it’s really hard to judge what that index size count really even means. If it means anything at all.

I’ve allways found it rather silly when little boys compare sizes of … hmm, whatever “objects” they love. But, it takes more than one to turn it into a game and I don’t think anyone can claim Yahoo is the only one that have been playing this game of size.

All major search engines have a great deal of questionable content indexed: Own SERPS, dead pages, duplicate content and general crap. Who’s got the most is not really importan to me – or most other searchers. What is important to me is not if I get 1 million or 10 million results for my query but if I get just that ONE page I was hoping to find. Quality matters – size rarely does.

I wish that all the major engines would find a common way to meassure and compete for quality instead. Danny Sullivan have been preaching this for years but so far with very little response. It would make so much sense instead of this, sorry, but rather childish: Look, mine is bigger than yours, game

3 of my sites have less than half the number of indexed pages (and even still many of those are the not indexed though known about variety) in G as in Y.