Yep, that's right. People are STILL talking about size and whether or not it matters. While you may have thought that that was an issue settled ages ago, apparently Yahoo!'s claim last week struck some nerves and managed to set the whole industry buzzing.

While I obviously agree with Danny that relevancy is worth far more than size, I can also see the other side of the issue. Jeremy Zawodny makes a couple of excellent points this week in his blog. First, he points out that no one ever jumped all over Google or AlltheWeb when they got into their size wars last year. Sure, folks rolled their eyes, but they didn't get near the negative attention over it that Yahoo! has. Secondly, Zawodny points out that in many instances size DOES matter. He says: " If Google indexed only 100,000 documents, would it be nearly as useful as it is today? Of course not. Without indexing a reasonable amount of the Web, they'd be missing important stuff."

He's right. But so is Danny. Here's why.

Size is an issue...but once you reach a certain point, it becomes less of an issue. The problem is that so many people seem to be going on the assumption that Google already has all the "good" pages in their index. What good could possibly contained within all those new Yahoo! pages that Google doesn't have? Well, you never know. There could be some great sites that for whatever reason, Google is missing. (can anyone say aging delay?) That's where relevancy comes in. It's not about how many sites a search engine has, it's about the quality of sites.

Apparently the debate isn't going to go away overnight. We're all going to have to obsess about it for a bit first. (Anyone else think it's ironic that we're obsessing about the fact that people are obsessing about it?)

So what's it to you? Well...I guess chances are better that your site is going to be included in Yahoo! index, since they claim to have so many more pages than Google. Of course that doesn't mean that you're going to rank any better...it just means that you are there...somewhere...

Anyway, if you are interested in hearing more about the issue Jim Hedger does a good job of looking into the debate this week and points out some of the issues that both searchers and the search engines should be focusing on. Check out his thoughts in today's article: Size Less Important Than User Utility.