Net Wars - Revenge of The Search-Engine

Yahoo announced that they index about 20 billion pages (versus Google's 8 billion pages). CNet was euphoric (see the title ... it's clickable :D).

In my opinion, the trouble is not that Yahoo is searching more, but Yahoo is actually searching better. If you will look only through a few searches you will see that Yahoo's search engines seem a little bit more relevant.

This seems to be a phenomena that is happening for some time. I was aware of it only when I realized that Google did not index pictures of Abu Ghraib abuses. Somehow, Google didn't seem so "not evil"-ish to me anymore. Of course, it has great software, but ... something is not right. This was not the only incident of its kind.

The battle for the web is most certainly not over. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all have some aces in their hands. Google is rumoured to acquire Meetro. However with a market strongly dominated by Yahoo and MSN messenger, this seems to be very difficult. As counter, Yahoo released Yahoo Messenger 7 which is hailed to be a Skype-killer.

Google News was also improved by Google. It has RSS feeds. But so did Yahoo (at least since June last year). And since both services are based on the search engines of their owners, Google seems to be at loss again.

I am very interested on the way this competition will improve searching. I finish this with a quote of Frank Herbert:

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."