Google's Censorship in China Worked, Wins
Favor
This image found on Google's non-China sites
After complying with Chinese requirements that it censor its search
engine results to those people reaching them in China, Google has
won a business license to operate in the Communist state. Reuters
reports from anonymous sources that the search giant now plans to
open an office within the year. That office will include a sales
team geared to attracting China's largest firms to the ways of search
marketing.
SEARCH ENGINES INCREASE COVERAGE; WebProNews
As we go through existence, we find there are great questions in life:
What is life's meaning? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen
swallow? And finally, just how big is the Internet? A recent study
attempted to put some of the Internet question into perspective
and they discuss how much is covered by the big search engines.
First, we need to discuss just big the Internet is. WOW! It is
insanely large. Antonio Gulli of the University of Pisa (Universita
di Pisa) and Alessio Signorini at the University of Iowa have been
working on this topic for a while and have published an abstract
documenting just how big the internet is or could be and also how
big search engines are and how much of this vast world of information
is covered.
They state previous estimates on the size of the Internet are now
obsolete. The studies done in 1997 and 1998 respectively were much
smaller in their scale. The first in 1997 was around 200 million
pages and 1998 was around 800 million pages. Not even close anymore.
The current study estimates around 11.5 billion pages. That's a
lot of pages. They break down that total by coverage of search engines.
Break It Down
One point they do mention is that the search engines underestimate
their own coverage areas. Google, the largest engine claims to cover
8.1 billion pages, the abstract says 8.8 billion pages at a coverage
rate of 76.2%. They were closest to their estimate of coverage area.
Yahoo ranked second and they severely underestimated their coverage
rate. Yahoo estimates coverage of 4.2 billion and were closer to
8 billion or a 69.3% coverage area.
MSN claimed it covered 5 billion pages and the study showed 7.1
billion or 61.9% coverage. This is their beta too. They could give
Google a run in the future. Ask Jeeves/Teoma ranked 4th, estimating
2.5 billion covered and the study said 6.6 billion or 57.6%. The
indexed web hit about 9.4 billion or 81.4%
Methodic Madness
The method these gentlemen used was based on the 1997 study. The
original study utilized 35,000 queries in English; the new study
covered over 438,141 queries in 75 languages. This gives the study
some international meaning, not just the U.S. spin and gives a much
stronger estimate than originally done back in the 90s.
The primary flaw to this abstract is that it only covers the accessible
pages search engines can find. There are billion of pages in various
systems search engines haven't grabbed. Search Engine Watch says
some estimate over 500 billion pages.
Keep in mind too that even though Google returns 9 million hits,
less the 50,000 talk about her battle with Hepatitis C and even
then, how many of those pages would actually be significant. Relevancy
is still the key to it all. All those sights are pointless if they
don't give good, reliable information.
Uses for this information are myriad. It gives some basis for what
we're dealing with on the Internet and how big it might be. It could
help with marketing, especially as companies prepare to move into
the other markets, like China. With Google getting access to the
mainland in Shanghai and owning a percentage of Baidu and Yahoo
already in China, this makes this study even more relevant.
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