Paper Info
Title
A Longitudinal Analysis Of Search Engine Index Size
Abstract
One of the determining factors of the quality of Web search engines is the size of their index. In addition to its influence on search result quality, the size of the indexed Web can also tell us something about which parts of the WWW are directly accessible to the everyday user. We propose a novel method of estimating the size of a Web search engine's index by extrapolating from document frequencies of words observed in a large static corpus of Web pages. In addition, we provide a unique longitudinal perspective on the size of Google and Bing's indexes over a nine-year period, from March 2006 until January 2015. We find that index size estimates of these two search engines tend to vary dramatically over time, with Google generally possessing a larger index than Bing. This result raises doubts about the reliability of previous one-off estimates of the size of the indexed Web. We find that much, if not all of this variability can be explained by changes in the indexing and ranking infrastructure of Google and Bing. This casts further doubt on whether Web search engines can be used reliably for cross-sectional webometric studies.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
PROCEEDINGS OF ISSI 2015 ISTANBUL: 15TH INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF SCIENTOMETRICS AND INFORMETRICS CONFERENCE
Web search engine,Site map,World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Web page,Computer science,Search engine optimization,Search engine indexing,Search analytics,Web crawler,Spamdexing
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
2175-1935
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
14
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Antal Van Den Bosch11038132.37
Toine Bogers237035.89
Maurice de Kunder300.34