Monday, August 15, 2005

Searching for answer to 'How big is the Net?'

A New York Times article by John Markoff, via The International Herald Tribune, reports that:

How big is the World Wide Web? Many Internet engineers consider that query one of those imponderable philosophical questions, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But the question about the size of the Web came under intense debate last week after Yahoo announced at an Internet search engine conference in Santa Clara, California, that its search engine index - an accounting of the number of documents that can be located from its databases - had reached 19.2 billion.

Because the number was more than twice as large as the 8.1 billion documents currently reported by Google, Yahoo's fierce competitor and Silicon Valley neighbor, the announcement - actually a brief mention in a Yahoo company Web log - set off a spat.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home