Asking the right questions

Relevance has become the new theme of all of our propaganda (and hopefully our product). It's on other minds too.

In the midst of the pissing match between Yahoo! and Google over search size, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch challenges the behemoths to report instead on relevancy:

I cannot believe we're going through this again. This is Search Engine Size Wars VI, by my count. It's absurd. It's annoying. It's a friggin' waste of time. Instead of advancing to a commonly accepted relevancy figure, the search engines want to keep us mired in the mud of who's biggest.

Who's biggest really doesn't matter, as I and others have written so, so, so, so, so many times before. Reasons? There are many. How about...

• You need the whole haystack! Here, if I dump it all on your head, can you find the needle now?
  
• If you have lots of documents but they are all near duplicates of each other, is that good?
  
• How much of a document have you indexed -- 101K, 500K, 1MB?

Linkprops to the always relevant Fred Wilson.