Don't Waste Time On Web's Biggest

A new search engine “Web’s Biggest” has come out claiming they are bigger than the other major search engines. Wow,
rush on over! Don’t waste your time.

First, I highly doubt the claim. The search engine provides no count numbers with its results, so there’s no way to run comparisons. Doing comparisons always is problematic
anyway, but counts are a basic starting point.

It does provide a page that purports to show how it is bigger than the others. Enter a number, and it supposedly
generates a random list of sites that supposedly have no or few pages listed at Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Oddly, no matter what number I enter, I get the same sites listed. And the links showing results at the other search engines? They don’t use the right commands to bring
back accurate results. And when I do use the right command? Over at Google, I get signs that the sites may have been banned. For comparison purposes, this “proof” shows
nothing.

But let’s assume that this site really was bigger than the others. Time to roll out the trusty haystack analogy of why bigger is better. How can you find the needle in the
haystack if “small” search engines hunt through only half of it? That’s something we used to hear in the early days of the search engine size wars.

I have my own haystack response that I’ve long used in these situations. If I dump the entire haystack on your head, can you find the needle then?

Going back to this site, we get plenty of proof on why having the entire haystack is no help if you don’t have a powerful magnet to pull the good needles to the top. A
search for “movies” brings up a list dominated by porn sites (OK, I suppose they ARE movies). “Cars” brings up travel search engines and give away sites. “US patents” fails to
find the US Patent Office.

All in all, I find a good use for the nofollow attribute for the first time. For more on size issues, see
my recent Search Engine Size Wars V Erupts post.