In the latest round of the search-index size contest, Google unveiled an updated index it said is more than three times larger than that of any of its search engine competitors.

"We're celebrating our seventh birthday...We had a pretty strong year," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with CNET News.com, as he listed the launch of new products including Google Talk, Google Earth, Google Video and Google Desktop Search. "And we've sort of been struggling here with respect to the index. It has always been much larger than the others."

"We're announcing tonight that in terms of unduplicated pages our index is now three times larger than any other search engine," he said, without saying how many pages are in the index.

Google will stop providing on its search page a quantity of pages indexed, which previously was listed as 8 billion, "because people don't necessarily agree on how to count it," Schmidt said.

In addition, the company will encourage users to test out the search engines using a specialized query to see which provides the most results, he said.

"We want end users to derive the number to their satisfaction. They will discover that ours is larger," he said.

Full article: ZDNet News