In a major expansion, Yahoo Inc said that its online search-engine index now spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images, nearly double the material scanned by rival Google Inc.
Yahoo's expansion doesn't necessarily mean it produces more useful results than Google, which has long been considered the Internet's most comprehensive database.
But the breakthrough gives the Sunnyvale-based company the bragging rights to a widely watched measurement for assessing the power of an Internet search engine.
Yahoo said on Monday that its index, boosted by a recent upgrade, covers 20.8 billion online "objects," comprised of about 19.2 billion documents and 1.6 billion images.
By comparison, Google said it tracks 11.3 billion objects. That figure consists of the nearly 8.2 billion Web pages that Google proudly touts on its home page and 2.1 billion images, with the remainder of material coming from its group discussions.
Until Monday, Yahoo hadn't publicly disclosed the size of its search index, but industry estimates had placed the figure somewhere between 6 billion and 8 billion.
"This is a great reason for more people to check us out," said Eckart Walther, Yahoo's vice president of products. "We are more comprehensive than anyone else out there."
In a statement late on Monday, Google spokesman Nate Tyler questioned whether the size of Yahoo's search index had really surpassed its own.
"We welcome innovation in search, but as of this afternoon we have not been able to verify a substantial increase to Yahoo's Web index via their search results," Tyler said.
Yahoo has had its sights set on Google since early last year when it introduced its own search technology and index to end a business partnership between the two companies.
Since the split, Google has maintained a comfortable lead over Yahoo, even as its challenger continued to roll out new features that impressed industry analysts. Through June, Google held a 36.9 percent share of the US search-engine market with Yahoo at 30.4 percent, according to comScore Networks.
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