Yahoo Announces Size Expansion For Yahoo Images
Gary Price at Search Engine Watch Blog says Yahoo is announcing this afternoon that its image search engine now has 1 billion images. Gary also says to expect Google Images to announce a higher number than its current 880 million within a week. Translation: The numbers seen on the pages are purely for promotional purposes. If Google says 880,000,000 it really has at least 1.2 billion, but any smart PR guy will tell you to lowball the figure as much as possible while still beating the competition. This way, when Yahoo says it has a billion, you immeadiatly "update" the number to 1.1 billion, and tell the image guys to get it to 2 billion as soon as possible. Trust me, Yahoo doesn't have a billion. It probably has 1.2 billion also. These numbers are meaningless, and are simply blows in the search engine war, far too reminiscent of the mid-90s war. Google won the war by proving it was relevancy that mattered, not numbers. Yahoo is doing a good job fighting Google, but this fight is just on the wrong turf.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 10/21/2004 03:55:00 PM