yahoo switch from google results

nahdoic

finally ... they've done it. Ever since the florida update many SEOers were pretty peeved with google to say the least, many seem to be rejoicing now their top rankings have been restored by yahoo.

Interesting times ahead - bring on the new msn search engine too.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum35/1695.htm

Yahoo Inc. will begin using its own technology Wednesday to conduct searches on its network of Web sites, displacing Google Inc., its one-time ally turned rival. Visitors to Yahoo's U.S. Web site will be the first to experience the changes. Over the next couple of weeks, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, Calif., will introduce its own Web technology world-wide. Once the conversion is complete, Yahoo says its search technology will power nearly half of online searches in the U.S. That includes searches on other sites that use Yahoo technology, such as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN service. The introduction of Yahoo's own search technology marks the company's formal break with Google. Yahoo began using Google's search technology in 2000, when Google was a little-known start-up. But Google, of neighboring Mountain View, Calif., has since morphed into one of Yahoo's biggest competitors for directing computer users around the Web.

- The Wall Street Journal

daveirl

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dahamsta

Originally posted by daveirl
Why should we feel pity for the SEOs?

First against the wall come the revolution. Well, third, we need to deal with the spammers and kidiots first. Fourth, let's get rid of the lusers too.

adam

mneylon

Originally posted by daveirl
Why should we feel pity for the SEOs? They are trying to get sites up the rankings that may or may not be the best result. So Google is doing us a favour when it penalises sites that are "cheating"

If only it were that simple. Google's attempts to block search engine spammers also results in a LOT of relevant sites being pushed down.
http://www.google.ie/search?q=irish+insurance&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=

- finally reflects what you would expect for the key phrase. For the last 4 months it wasn't

jmcc

Originally posted by daveirl
So Google is doing us a favour when it penalises sites that are "cheating"

It depends on your definition of 'cheating'. Most Irish websites are woefully constructed from a search engine point of view and do not have common meta tags such as keywords or descriptions. Optimising a site generally involves adding these items. However going beyond that with cloaking and other deceptive practices is, in my opinion as a search engine operator, cheating.

The Yahoo search is still crap.

On some queries, it is better than Google. It seems to have culled a lot of the search engine results pages spam that populates Google. These are pages generated from search results provided by Espotting or Overture and are a complete waste of resources. If Yahoo gets a reputation for having a largely spam free index, Google could have problems. But the switch is still going on and the real effects will not be seen for a few months. Yahoo actually has better search algorithms and methodology than Google. (I think that it was the FAST/Inktomi deal that brought this into Yahoo.) I don't think that it has been fully deployed yet.

So I don't have much stock in the quality of the Yahoo engine. Even the Web Crawler they use seems to be far more inefficient than the Google Bot. It keeps looking for documents that I put 403 redirects on ages ago.

The Inktomi spider can be a bit braindead at times. However a 403 is perhaps not the best result as it could always change. There is a 'content gone/removed' 4xx error code which may be better to use. At a guess, Yahoo has not really deployed all the search engine resources at its disposal. It would not make sense to do so just yet as Google has not gone for its IPO.

Regards...jmcc

tomED

Originally posted by daveirl
The Yahoo search is still crap.

Yeah I agee with JMCC - in fact the results aren't that bad at all. Even if you look at the same search query in goolge, there isn't much of a difference apart from "Irish Rugby Now!" being out of the top ten and of course the outdated geocities site.

It's always been easy to spam the inktomi search results - so hopefully their combined knowledge can get the upper hand on spamming sites.

Google at the moment isn't much better for keeping spammy sites out. On the top phrases maybe its doing a good job, but lower down the scale it's full of spamming sites results.

Sad an' all that I am - I'm actually looking forward to the coming months to see if Yahoo can really compete with Google... again.... Makes my job a whole lot more fun!

dahamsta

I was ego surfing last night on Yahoo! and the results seemed a bit cleaner than on Google. Google's lost the plot in my view, it won't take much to get me to move on. The spam on Google is beyond belief at this stage. I'd like to take the Kelkoo guy out and kick his ass.

adam

Terminator

We're not going to notice much of difference over here until Yahoo deploys its new search engine on yahoo.ie.

I'm particularly looking forward to Google's forthcoming email service - this would really eat into Yahoo's userbase and perhaps force them to drop the pop-ups and mini-movie ads that currently plague the site.

daveirl

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mneylon

Originally posted by daveirl


The Yahoo search is still crap. Look at this search - http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-pull-web-t&p=irish+rugby+news - the number one site is a hugely out of date Geocities site, while neglecting the IRFU site, Rugby.ie and a load of other better matches.

The IRFU site comes up second. Could you qualify "better matches"?

daveirl

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Terminator

The yahoo example you gave is misleading as your search term has two spaces between the second and last word. When you take the extra space out the results are more in line with Google.

daveirl

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Terminator

Nah - it was just me being picky