I've read this study some where before, or one similar. Canidae have a long snout for a reason - it contains a long olfactory mucous membrane system lined with billions of olfactory receptors that can distinguish tens of thousands - probably more - unique scents: at least 10,000 times more smells than humans can detect. Dogs have over 2 billion olfactory receptors while humans only have about 10 million. The olfactory information is used for individual recognition, to maintain affiliations, to reduce competition - such as by marking their territory - and to bring back information to the pack, etc.
Dogs only have 30% more olfactory receptors (OR) genes that encode for their olfactory receptors than humans - rats and mice about 60% more - but 70% of the human OR genes are nonfunctional pseudogenes (see:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/6/2870 and
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=16022). Dogs have about 1200 (1178) OR genes compared to 350 for humans. However, even though the number of genes that encode for olfactory receptors are only about four times as great, the big difference in olfactory ability lies in the much greater number of olfactory nerve cells and the way that they are processed in the brain. The olfactory receptors send signals to the olfactory lobe in the brain, and canids' olfactory lobes are much larger than humans'.
"Although humans do have a good sense of smell—we can detect about 10,000 different odors—our olfactory capability is not as good as those of many vertebrates, especially fish and other mammals. A dog, for example, has up to 40 million nerve endings per square centimeter of nasal epithelium, many more than we do."
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/biog105/pages/demos/105/unit10/tastesmell.html
"Dogs have 40 times more olfactory cells – the cells that allow the recognition of a smell – than humans do. As a result, a dog has 200 million olfactory cells against 5 million in humans."
http://expasy.org/prolune/pdf/prolune014_en.pdf.
The key in Canidae's superior scent recognition is the plethora of volatile odorant molecules that they are able to detect through their large and long complex olfactory epithelium. Canids have seven transmembrane domains in their olfactory system that are enervated by thousands of nerve cells spread across their olfactory epithelium. Each neuron has one distinct odorant receptor that can bind with many specific and different odorants with different affinities. But if more than one bind with many different affinities then this enables the differences in scent that they can detect to be exponential.
"The size of the epithelium is a good indicator of the acuity of an animal's sense of smell. For example, the surface area of a human epithelium is 10 cm, whereas the surface area of a dog's epithelium is 170cm^2. Dogs also have 100 times more receptors per square centimeter than humans, so, needless to say, dogs have a much better sense of smell."
http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/Smell/nasal.html
The size of the snout does matter a lot. Consequently, I think that breeder's who breed short muzzle pug-faced dogs - for whatever reason they do so? - are doing the dog an injustice because they are artificially genetically engineering a loss to its original wolf-like olfactory ability. Not to be a racist, but aren't they breeding toward an inferior canid subspecies? Why deprive the dog of its inherent sense of smell?
"Gene Studies:
From rodents through the primate series to humans there is a progressive reduction in the proportion of functional olfactory receptor genes. Mice have approximately 1,300 olfactory receptor genes, of which some 1,100 are functional, whereas humans have only some 350 functional genes of approximately 1,000. The conclusion seems obvious: the low number of functional olfactory receptor genes in humans compared with rodents—and presumably most other mammals—is directly correlated with the evolutionary decline in the human sense of smell."
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020146
See also: The Human Sense of Smell: Are We Better Than We Think?
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=406401
TOP SECRET: On the Prowl with the Secret Bomb Dogs
"These dogs enjoy their work: There is no greater demonstration of vocational happiness than a bomb dog on the scent of something explosive. And it's lucky for us that they love it like they do....Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the government's primary center for bomb-dog training, used to talk to reporters about its training program, but since Sept. 11, officials there have been under orders from the Pentagon to keep all bomb-dog information classified. The closest they'll come to actual data is saying that the number of dogs being trained there has "increased." The Federal Aviation Administration, which gets many of its dogs from Lackland, plans to have 300 bomb-dog teams at 80 airports by 2003, but officials there won't say what, exactly, those dogs will be doing, how many will be at each airport or how the dogs have been trained."
http://www.salon.com/people/2002/03/04/bomb_dogs/