PCInk - 8:26 am on Oct 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

If you assume that Ink wants to challenge G, then wouldn't it have to crawl as much of the net as possible? ... The smaller the number of sites in their database, the less likely they can return the best results.

May not be correct. Lets imagaine, for example, that AltaVista crawled twice as many pages as Google, would this make make their results more relevant? I don't think it would - the algorithm of AV is not up to the quality of G.

I would recommend that they improve the algorithm before crawling all other pages. If there is not enough relevance, no-one will use them if they have 50 pages or 50 billion pages to search through.

The problem with stating that you simply need more pages to be a better engine is false because if every search started with 200 results of spam, afiliates and viagra adverts, you would stop using the search engine and go to a competitor.

Google is where they are now for one reason and one reason alone:
*** RELEVANCE ***
(It was not the largest engine when it was becoming popular - so what made it popular? Obviously not the number of pages)

P.S. When the algorithms are perfected - the time to crawl more pages starts...so when you search for rare items/words the obscure pages can be found. This is what Google has done, firstly improve alogrithm, secondly crawl everything it can.

Also see:
[webmasterworld.com...]
About Inktomi and algorithms