Google index - the biggest?

[lukasz]

Many people at this forum mentioned that Google index is the biggest.However during recent searches on ATW I've noticed that I am getting more results on ATW than on Google.
So I did lttle comparison of Google and ATW and on 80% of searches ATW returned higher number of results and usually the difference was between 50-100%. On the searches where google produced more results the margin was much lower (10-50%). I must notice that ATW sometimes gives more than one result from the same site, on the other hand Google number of results include "very similar entries" so the numbers should be comperable.

I am missing something , or Google index is not the biggest?

[edited by: heini at 9:38 am (utc) on June 3, 2003]
[edit reason] scroll fixed [/edit]

[IITian]

I too have wondered about this. Google seems to be slow in including newer pages. While it might still be true that Google indexes the largest number of pages, I am interested in knowing if this will hold true if we restrict searches to pages created during, say, last 6 months.

[Kirby]

I did a search for industry specific template websites designed by one company that has sold 20,000 web sites by searching "Web site design and hosting provided by ********* ".

Google returned 3 results. ATW returned 82,129

Did the same search an hour later.
Google = 12,800 results
ATW = 82,129

Don't know if this means anything or not.

[pawel]

How long does it take to get listed with Google? 2-3 months? Isn't this a bit quickier with ATW? ;)

[takagi]

When a multiple keyword search on Google shows less than 50 results, I sometimes try AllTheWeb. Usually ATW show less result, but sometimes pages not mentioned in Google's SERP.

FAST (ATW) sent on June 17, 2002 a press release [fastsearch.com] stating their SE indexed more pages (2,095,568,809) than Google at that time (2,073,418,204). And a month later FAST reported already 2,112,188,990 indexed pages. On August 8, 2002 Google changed the counter on the home page to 2,469,940,685 and since November 6, 2002 it stands at 3,083,324,652. In the mean time, FAST changed the counter to 2,142,833,819 (March 1, 2003).

So since the press release almost a year ago, FAST reported a 2% increase and Google 49% increase.

Please do realize, size is not everything.

[1milehgh80210]

Index size would have to be one of the most easily inflated #s. Who can prove or disprove it?
And its always changing.