Google Dominates New Size Showdowns

I've finally updated my Relative Size Showdown along with the related Change Over Time and Total Size Estimate analyses. Despite the efforts of several competitors, Google stayed solidly in the lead and for the first time since I've been doing these comparisons, Google ranked first on every one of the 25 searches. Even so, AlltheWeb grew significantly since last March and certainly narrowed the gap, while the oft-forgotten AltaVista also made a major size increase and pulled into third place. These comparisons looked at the results from 25 small searches where I could verify the results.

At least all the main search engines found more results than they did last March, except for WiseNut and the nearly dead Northern Light (via NLResearch). This was also the first comparison to include Gigablast. I neglected OpenFind since the results were too inconsistent and still full of errors. I should also note that I am just finally publishing these results, but the data is from Dec. 31, 2002. There has been much change since then with a new Google database and further updates at AlltheWeb and others. Still, I hope it is useful as one snapshot in time of how the size of the search engines databases compare with each other.