heini - 8:50 am on Aug 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

Good points, Chiyo.

I think there are some points to be made for index size though, with the most important being promotional effects. It's a great PR tool being able to claim the largest index. We have seen this used in favour of Google over and over, it's something you can feed to all mainstream journalists. Everybody understands big numbers.

Technically having a large index is probably important for accuracy of ranking mechanisms, which take linking patterns into account.

Another point to consider is the permanent growth of the web. Having a 1 Bill docs index in spring 2002 means probably you have the same slice of the web indexed as with a 3 Bill. index in atumn 2003.

This has also to do with the explosive growth of large parts of the web in countries where webpublishing is just starting to become a mass phenomenon.

Also Google as well as ATW now have much more filetypes to index.

If in say two years we still have general search engines with the quest to index all_the_web I expect them to hold indexes of well over 10 Bill, perhpas much more.