Monday, Yahoo! announced that it has over 20 billion indexed web pages and web files in its search engine. In a huge expansion effort, Yahoo! almost doubles its capacity over that of Google’s roughly 11 billion web elements.
“Of the 20 billion elements in Yahoo’s database, 19 billion are documents, 1.5 billion images and more than 50 million audio and video files, the company said.”
Yahoo!’s 20 billion items far distances the 8 billion that many analysts and observers thought that the company had. “This is a great reason for more people to check us out,” Yahoo Vice President of Products Eckhart Walther told the AP. “We are more comprehensive than anyone else out there.”
Yahoo! has struggled to regain its status as “THE” web portal and search engine of the Internet after recently (relatively) losing popularity to Google, whom Yahoo! licensed its search features from for a few years until purchasing Overture and making Yahoo!’s search engine in-house.