In the lead this month...

Yahoo! announced last week that it had radically expanded the site of its index to include over 20 billion documents and images. For those keeping track, that's nearly twice as many documents as Google claims to have indexed.

With search engines announcing increases in index size on a fairly regular basis in order to gain short-term bragging rights, the announcement isn't that surprising. The announcement marked the first time that Yahoo! had announced the size of its index, though many estimated that it was somewhere between 6 and 8 billion documents before.

The real question here, when it comes to the searcher, or to the small business owner, is: Who cares? Seriously...so you have twice as many documents in your index. Does that make it twice as easy for me to find things? Does it make it twice as easy for me to get my site out in front of a customer? No? No again? Really? Then yay for you, cause it doesn't look like much has changed for me.

One search engine veteran that gets it is Become.com's Michael Yang. When asked to share his perspective on the search engine size wars, he summed it up this way: "A larger index means nothing to consumers if they do not deliver relevant results. If you are looking for objective reviews and research information while buying a television, for example, the 415,000,000 results on Yahoo are equally useless as the 124,000,000 results returned by Google, if they are not targeted to the needs of the user."