How Many Web Pages in MSN

[bethabernathy]

Hi There: Does anyone know how many web pages are listed in MSN? With various searches I get Hotbot results in terms of very close to MSN. With the same searches Yahoo is about 6 x as large. Perhaps MSN is living on the paid inclusion contracts, actually that isn't it, but I thought I would try. :)

[dannysullivan]

Yahoo won't even say publicly how many pages it indexes. However, Yahoo-powered sites outside of Yahoo do appear to have indexes that are much smaller than at Yahoo itself. See this recent thread that covers it, Is MSN tougher about 'over optimization' than Google? (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62)

[bethabernathy]

I had read that post earlier. I wonder what the big secret is related to the size? If I recall correctly, there was information on Inktomi's size i.e. Jan. 2003 Inktomi's database contained approx. 3 billion webpages. Although, thank you for the info. -Beth :)

[dannysullivan]

The main reason to avoid size figures is to get out of the oneupmanship that can happen. If Yahoo says they are 6 billion pages, Google will say 6 billion+1, then they say 6 billion+2 and so on. I still like to have the figures anyway as a general benchmark.