Yahoo! Launches 20 Billion Item Index, Google does Amazing PR to Downplay Story

Biggest, Baddest, ETC:

• Yahoo! says 20 billion items in their index

• At SES DaveN predicted heavy spam problems for them (read as Dave making bank from stuffing spam in their index).
• Interesting to see how little coverage Yahoo! has got compared to Google's similar size matters mentions in the past.
• While Jeremy defends the index size traditional media sources like the New York Times looks to Google co founder Sergey Brin as a credible source to discount the story, and Danny is sick of the size comparisons.
• Google also slightly increased their number (from 8,058,044,651 to 8,168,684,336), which may be an attempt to further refute / undermine Yahoo!'s claim. Gary says Google gave them the new number before Yahoo! did, which makes me wonder if Google has a few people who know the pulse on Yahoo!
• Google always used index size as free marketing it's whole way up, and now that someone is ahead they simply said the figure is useless and everyone agrees. Amazing PR.