Dense, but interesting stuff. Tristan looks at the incoming links for the Technorati 100 at Google versus Yahoo. I wonder what Sifry, Jeremy, or the folks at Blogger have to say about this? Some of Tristan’s conclusions:
# Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results
# Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google
# While the front page of Google advertises they are currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is very difficult to find ways to support that claim via the link feature they are offering: this can be seen as confirmation that Google does not tell you about all the links it has in its index.
Danny gives his analysis here.
Update: Sifry has his take here.
Actually, as I noted in an earlier comment, Google almost always indexes fewer referring pages for any given URL vis a vis Yahoo or MSN. In fact, it seems that MSN does the best job of indexing, closely followed by Yahoo. I was astounded to discover that this is the case, but it really does hold true. Tristan just uncovered the blogging part of a greater truth–Google does an inferior job indexing pages as compared to Yahoo and MSN.
This is some analysis I did on speed to index, that I personally think is a lot more useful (and interesting): http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/tech/2005/6/23/Search_Engine_Indexing_Speed.txt
It compares time-to-index for 6 search engines (MSN, Google, Yahoo, Blogdigger, Technorati and Feedster).