14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of September, Microsoft transitioned its search engine debuted in 2005 under the Windows Live platform to version 2.0. At that time, the Redmond company emphasized a fourfold increase in its index size, but failed to reveal the actual volume of indexed items. Speculations pointed to either 20 billion or 30 billion indexed pages, a substantial growth to accompany the evolution of the core search technology of Live Search. Microsoft only detailed the fact that it has quadrupled the size of the Live Search index with version 2.0, in a move designed to bring it on an equivalent position to that of Google and Yahoo in terms of web reach.
However, at the beginning of October, a member of the Live Search Team offered official confirmation of the Live Search 2.0 index size. "We are now searching 20 billion Web pages. This is 4 times the size of our previous index. Enough said. Well, one more thing - we now have the infrastructure to easily add billions (yes, billions) more with relative ease. This ensures we are always pushing the envelope with regard to the amount of human knowledge in our index", the Live Search representative stated.
But the quadrupling of the index size also offers an interesting perspective over the status of Live Search web coverage before the introduction of version 2.0. And in this context, it seems that Microsoft, via Live Search, only managed to index and offer users some 5 billion web pages by the end of September 2007. This means that from the introduction of Live Search in November 2005 and through most of 2007, the Windows Live search engine returned far less results to user queries than Google did at the end of 2005. This situation of course contributed to Microsoft's now traditional third position on the search engine market, behind Google and Yahoo.
Still in the position of the ultimate underdog, Microsoft has poured a consistent amount of resources and effort into Live Search 2.0. "In building 88 on Microsoft's main campus in Redmond, WA there is a small, but growing group of us that think about relevance constantly. We eat, live and breathe ideas and technology that makes our relevance better. Having worked on this release for a little over 9 months we could not be more excited about the relevance of our new engine. From our metrics, and more importantly our usage as customers, our new engine is so far superior to our old one," the Live Search representative added.