Alltheweb increases index

• Aug. 21, 2003

In an effort to become the best search engine results provider, Overture announced today that Alltheweb has increased the size of their database to 3.15 billion pages, which is slightly higher than Google's 3.08 billion pages. It's also almost a billion pages higher than they were reporting yesterday.

While Google has historically been able to boast the largest index, this may come as a blow to their supremacy. However, when I see news like this my first question is "sure you have the biggest index, but how relevant is it?" I mean, am I going to find what I want in the first few results, or am I going to have to scroll through pages of results to find what it is I'm looking for?

So, I performed a test. I took a few phrases at random and performed searches on both engines. And to my surprise, the results were relatively close to each other. In some cases Alltheweb had more matches returned for a query, while in others Google lead. In the end I called it a tie, but I give Google just a slight advantage because after reviewing the results I felt that overall their results were slightly more relevant.

That's not to say that Alltheweb isn't a good alternative. In fact, in a couple tests I found the results to be better. So I guess it will come down to a personal preference. Would you rather see results from 68,418,465 more pages (in Alltheweb) with pretty good results, or would you rather use Google who has traditionally been the best, most relevant results provider?

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists