Google, Yahoo and MSN continue to trade claims about which search engines covers more web pages. Last month, Yahoo claimed it had grown to more than 20 billion pages in its index. To trump that, Google announced on its seventh birthday that it now covers three times as many pages as any search other engine.

Does this mean that Google now indexes 60 million pages? No! Google has taken issue with Yahoo’s claim of 20 million pages. In addition, Google did not release numbers of pages this time.

Besides the specific number of pages indexed, what are these search engines considering a “page”? While most people view the information contained within a single IE or Firefox window as a page, the industry is less clear. A site composed of tables may be considered 3 or 4 pages even though the user only sees one solid page. How about PDF, PPT and DOC files? Do these each count as a page? In addition, now that each major search engine allows users to search specifically for images and other specific areas, it is possible that they are including these as well.

Do users even care how many pages are in a search engine? Not at all! Users care about finding the information they need quickly.

A search engine may index several pages that include the information I am looking for on NASCAR Nextel Cup Driver Mark Martin or the good restaurants in East Village in Chicago (on two of the major engines it will take you three pages of results to find out that East Ukrainian Village became East Village several years ago, and it will take even longer to find something like Green Ginger off Division and Damen), but if I have to page through 100 pages of results to find the information I am looking for the service is not useful to me.

Search engine users only care about one thing – fast, accurate and safe access to the information that they want. Until their recent revisions, MSN and Google had become overrun with duplicate pages, fake pages and RSS headline consolidators. MSN’s latest revamp has done a fantastic job of removing these many of these pages from results (our current favorite engine, but who knows about next month). Google has also taken steps to combat this, but search engine analysts have seen many quirks as Google has began segmenting its search into regular, news and blog editions. While many of the problem pages have disappeared from Google search results, the recent indexing has received many harsh reviews for its negative effects on sites using blog or CRM platforms (as many non-blogs now use these platforms for managing content) and other dynamic pages.

As we recently reported, Google has the majority of the worldwide search engine traffic, but the search engine war is far from over. While Google is still playing in the “we’re bigger” claims, they have taken the right approach in not releasing specific numbers and encouraging users to try different search engines.

Relevance is true name of the game. Many of us have one of the search engine toolbars installed and use it for our primary searches. In Firefox, this even defaults to Google.

For the next week or two, try to use at least two of the other major search sites (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, Ask, etc.) during your searches. We would also be interested in hearing about your experience with the current search engine, so please comment and let us know what you like, don’t like or want to see out of the major search engines. What have they missed?