In the wake of Yahoo!'s announcement of a 20-billion-item index, nearly doubling Google's claimed index size, some debate has ensued. Google co-founder Sergey Brin asserted that Yahoo! was counting duplicate results to arrive at its figure. A study at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications determined that Google delivered more results in a series of 10,000 randomized searches. But that study eliminated all searches that returned over 1,000 results in either engine. I was talking with Susan Kuchinskas of InternetNews.com last night, and she wondered whether that methodology made sense. I didn't have a good answer, but this morning I tried my own (much smaller) series of random two-keyword searches (bilious blouse, frequent gestation, arcane pigeon, etc.), all of which returned over 1,000 results. I used the Gahoo!Yoogle engine to quickly compare Yahoo! and Google. In every case Yahoo! returned nearly twice as many results as Google. Not deeply scientific, but it does make you wonder whether the study missed a boat.