All About Content

Since the consensus is, more or less, that the size of an engine’s index doesn’t matter, it’s the results you get, sometimes it’s just fun to experiment to see both the number of results returned and what the highest ranking sites are for a keyword that likely isn’t the subject of anyone’s SEO efforts.

This weekend, a search on “.com” yields:

• In Google - 6,450,000,000 results.
  Top 3: Yahoo, CNN, Amazon
• In Yahoo Search - 10,700,000,000 results.
  Top 3: DotComArchive.org, Wikipedia entry on “dot-com”, FuckedCompany.com
• In MSN Search - 2,751,291,895 results.
  Top 3: Microsoft Component Object Model, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Maps

Scroll down to see a comparison of PageRank (according to the Google Toolbar) and inbound links to each page (using the advanced link: operator in Google and in Yahoo’s Site Explorer). Couple of things to keep in mind: the PageRank score displayed by the toolbar isn’t the actual PageRank used in the Google algorithm. Real PageRank is recalculated continuously, whereas the Toolbar is only updated once every couple of months. Also, Google only displays a “sampling” of backlinks, not all the links it’s aware of.