The major search engines recently had their semi-annual round and round over who’s got the biggest index in the industry. Yahoo! left Google agog as to just how its rival was able to achieve indexing some 19 billion pages, while the people’s champion, Google, assumed it was sitting pretty with 8 billion. Meanwhile, just under the booming echoes, a voice asks, “what about relevancy?” A question that goes unanswered while giants duke it out.

Danny Sullivan seemed a little steamed in a recent post on Search Engine Watch, as he outlined a history of search engine size boasting. Nearly reduced to the point of cursing, Sullivan relayed the fear that an emphasis on size over relevancy is like going back in time to the infancy of the search industry.

“I cannot believe we’re going through this again. This is Search Engine Size Wars VI, by my count. It’s absurd. It’s annoying. It’s a friggin’ waste of time. Instead of advancing to a commonly accepted relevancy figure, the search engines want to keep us mired in the mud of who’s biggest,” wrote Sullivan in his blog.

He goes on to explore the virtues of needles and haystacks, and suggested that being able to find useful information was more desirous than being lost in a giant warehouse of irrelevancy. The diatribe ended with a challenge to the competing search engines to find a way to measure, prove, and present relevancy figures, instead of trying to wow everyone with the size of their databases.

That’s a point to be applauded, especially from the purist perspective. Relevance is, indeed, a more useful statistic to tout to the masses.

Marketers may tell you however, that they have no faith in the masses who utilize the services they’re trying to sell. To the guy who’s lucky to figure out how to tap into a WiFi connection without an army of technically inclined friends, the size figures are what he’s going to notice first.

As for the word, “relevancy,” he may or may not have any clue what that means in the world of search. The simplest suggestion that Yahoo! has a larger searchable index is enough to steer him in that direction.

I agree with Mr. Sullivan that in order for those of us who keep track of search engine activities to be impressed, we’ll need better measures. But size is a simple concept and one readily comprehended by the public. So updates about how massive your index is becoming is an efficient and salient message, and one that must be pounded out by publicists to generate traffic that doesn’t know any better.