CNET announced the change in this article.

Google.com has been growing rapidly since its late start in the search engine business a couple years ago. They are well known for their highly relevant search results, winning numerous Editor's Choice awards. Netscape also uses them in some of its results. In fact, despite its odd sounding name, Google.com is by far my personal favorite for quickly locating hard to find pages on the Web. I recommend it to anyone who's been frustrated trying to find things on other engines.

Also in the news: Google now claims to have the largest database of Web pages on the Internet which "...Enables Internet Users to Search More Than 1 Billion URLs, Providing Quick and Easy Access to 560 Million Full-Text Indexed Web Pages and 500 Million Partially Indexed URLs."

The partially indexed URLs means that Google searches the keywords in the hypertext of a fully indexed Web page to find other Web pages related to a given search that it has not had time to fully index. For example, if I had a Web site that had a link that said "See Joe's car sales for more information" then a search on Google.com might be able to find Joe's web site based on that link, even though Google had not indexed the actual content of the page yet. Even without this little trick to partially search another half a billion pages, the half billion it fully indexes still puts Google at the top in terms of the size of its database.

Does the dropping of Inktomi by Yahoo mean Inktomi is a dead engine? Far from it. Inktomi continues to supply results to a number of major portals such as MSN, AOL, Goto, Iwon and others. In fact, I still see Inktomi's database used at a wider number of engines across the Web than any other brand name. This recent announcement by Google DOES mean, however that renewed importance should be given to Google.com as you create your marketing plan.

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