Yahoo is not “leading” Google |
At the present time Yahoo is not leading Google … where it really matters. Some others that I read today seem to disagree. I can understand that because Yahoo has been kicking up a lot of dust lately.
Take Marc Canter who agrees with Ben Hammersley, for example.
Hammersley thinks Yahoo’s currently superior API over Google, it’s recent acquisition of Flickr compared to Google’s Picasa, the counter to Google labs being Yahoo research, the upgrade of their email space to match Gmail’s 1GB (until today when Gmail doubled the space to 2GB), the recent ability to search Creative Commons license plus more combined makes Yahoo into the dominant force, quote:
Yahoo isn’t just back in the game - it’s winning. How weird is that?
I’ll concede that Yahoo is winning the game of toys, tools and timely activity; they are definitely leading that. They’ve got the geek factor working on all cylinders at the moment, but they still don’t have the all important search relevance.
Google hasn’t tried to be a portal — yet. And personally I hope they don’t travel down that pothole-infested road.
Next comes a newer blog ironically named: How Not To Blog which wrote this piece on 3/17/05 called Google needs to go back to “beta” and writes:
the competition
kicking ass. Yahoo will prevail, simply because of its more human element. (The element that makes everything more useful.) To me, Google is just a faceless machine with no personality. Google is just inspiration. Nobody uses the Betamax anymore.
First of all, Google is well known for being in perpetual beta with many of their services. They don’t need to go back to beta, they need to leave beta. Take Gmail for example that just turned a year old and has continued to add new features but is still in beta.
Secondly, the curious, although flawed, Betamax reference. Google isn’t Betamax. Betamax was a format that was technically superior (in some people’s minds anyway) kind of like LaserDiscs but neither could catch a significant following. Google already has firmly established legendary status and a huge following. It’s going to be almost as difficult to knock Google off the search engine perch as it will be to knock Microsoft off the home/business OS and OEM market.
And Yahoo’s human editors have equally human bias and speed working against them. What do I mean by speed? Submit to the Yahoo directory (without paying the express listing fee) and watch how long (two weeks since my last submission and still no response for this blog) it takes to get a response. Where in Google you can start a new site and link to it from another relative place and it will make it into the search engine in days instead of weeks or months. No submit feeds, no human beings.
However, How Not To Blog mentions a three month waiting time not being listed in Google? They must not have been linked by the right websites — or somehow be associated with an IP or domain where rules were broken in the past — because I’ve not seen or had any website of ours ever take three months to get listed in Google — and I’ve never submitted any of our websites to Google to be listed.
I just tried searching for How Not To Blog in both Yahoo and Google and couldn’t find this domain in either search engine in the top few results. Hmm.
The scientific and non-emotional response to which search engine is “leading” or “kicking ass” (to use How Not To Blog’s terminology) would be to measure specific relevant search results for each of the leading search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). I have not done a scientific analysis like this recently, but would like to conduct a study like this when I get some more time. Has anybody else done a study like this?
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First the disclaimer: I work for Yahoo, so I’m naturally biased, and I most certainly does NOT speak for Yahoo (or the PR people would get very mad
)
However you seem to be confusing the directory and the Yahoo! search engine, for instance. The directory long ago seized to be a priority, exactly for the reasons you mention: It can’t keep up. It’s a good resource if you want vetted sites, but the Yahoo! search engine is entirely separate, and uses the same kind of spidering and indexing technology as Google. So bringing Yahoo!’s directory into a discussion on search is flawed.
But it does highlight one major difference between the two: Yahoo! is a media company, focused on delivering content that users want, and sometimes we need to develop cool technology to meet those market needs. Google is a technology company, that focuses on bringing out dazzling tools based on their technology and try to monetise them afterwards.
The philosophies are fundamentally different.
Comment by Vidar Hokstad — April 2, 2005 @ 6:17 am PST
Hi Vidar - Thank you for stopping by and offering your insider perspective. That is greatly appreciated.
Actually, no, I’m very much not confusing the Yahoo directory and search, because I believe the Yahoo spider that roams pays more attention to the sites in its directory than other sites which are not listed in the directory.
Vidar, this blog has been in existence since July 4, 2003 and it’s in neither the Yahoo directory or the search engine. Why is this if Yahoo’s spider is so good? Google my name, “TDavid” and you’ll see four times the number of results in Google as Yahoo, but if you do the same in Yahoo you’ll see results but they are all from other web sites.
Please tell me from what I’ve done wrong at this blog not to be able to get listed with Yahoo, but to be listed regularly with Yahoo?
See this search (Yahoo) and note that this blog doesn’t come up in the first 50 results:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=TDavid&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8
Now check out MSN, it’s in the top 20 results, but has half the number of results as Yahoo:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=tdavid&first=11&count=10&FORM=PERE
Compare this same search at Google - 70,000 results of which #1 and #2 are this blog and my business website (tdscripts.com):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tdavid&btnG=Google+Search
Now let’s try to find this blog by the keywords: “Things that make you go hmm”
MSN - #2 out of 7,925:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%22things+that+make+you+go+hmm%22&FORM=QBRE
Google - #1 out of 7,700:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=%22things+that+make+you+go+hmm%22
Yahoo - ???? out of 28,600:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Things+that+make+you+go+hmm%22&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8
Note in the Yahoo case, #5 is the Flickr blog that I created back in July 2004 when testing but this blog (MakeYouGoHmm.com) is nowhere to be found in Yahoo.
Need another example? Try to find “TD Scripts” or “TDavid Scripts” that’s my business website that’s been in existence since summer 1999. People would search for those two keywords, don’t you think, but can you find it in Yahoo search? Nope. But you sure can find the actions of a crazed netizen who went everywhere a couple years ago about how he uncovered a vulnerability in one of my programs. Amazing how many of those same places never updated the patch.
On the other hand with both Google and MSN the #1 result is tdscripts.com as it should be for such obvious, direct searches.
It’s for reasons like this that I see such a very, very small amount of traffic from Yahoo search and I can’t recommend to my clients, friends and associates to use Yahoo web or directory search over Google or MSN.
With every new blog entry this blog pings Yahoo to notify that it has updated content. We have the My Yahoo link up. We have and have had a full, friendly, very spiderable RSS feed.
So any ideas, Vidar, why this blog and my business site rank so poorly in Yahoo for obvious search inquiries and, more importantly, what can be done to change this? I submitted (again) this blog to the Yahoo directory on March 19, 2005. Since that time, I’ve received neither listing or response (see entry above). I understand it takes a couple weeks to get reviewed for listing in the directory. It’s ok, we’ve been waiting almost two years for either the Yahoo spider for the main search or the Yahoo reviewers to put this blog in the directory and actually start spidering the site.
Comment by TDavid — April 2, 2005 @ 9:09 am PST
What should I do with 2GB?
Wow. Gmail has completed the 2GB upgrade (It’s 2050MB). I wonder what I should do with that much space. I already have an MSN.com account with 2GB but I use only 1% of it everyday.
I might store warez and stuff, Heh. :)…
Trackback by r0×0rz — April 2, 2005 @ 1:22 pm PST
First of all I was mainly addressing the “human element” part - that the Yahoo! and Google philosophies are significantly different: Yahoo! is branching out in every direction because that’s what our users want, and search is just one part of many. I was not commenting on search engine quality, nor will I.
Though I will try to address your questions. I’m not on the search team, and I’m not authorised to speak for the company, so my answers are from a general knowledge only and only represents my opinion on the subject.
If you have had problems getting listed in the search engine for several years, the problem is not only with Yahoo!’s spider. Until last year, Yahoo!’s search was powered by Google (and I’m not revealing anything new here - the switch from Google to our own engine was heavily publicised).
First, I don’t think there’s any connection between a listing in the directory and a high listing in the search engine results. It’s possible, but I’ve never seen anything that indicates it is so. The directory has been deemphasised for years and it’s ALWAYS been notoriously hard to get a listing in it. It’s just even harder now - the number of sites being submitted is ridiculous. Keep in mind that a listing in the directory is in no way guaranteed. In fact none of the sites I’ve ever submitted to the directory have ever made it in, and my first attempt was back in ‘97-’98. One of the very reasons why automated search engines rose to prominence was exactly that human edited directories can’t keep up.
As for some general observations on, and questions about why you’re having problems getting high up on the search results (note again, that I’m not in the search team, and I don’t know the details of how the search engine ranking for our engine works):
- You’ve chosen a very common phrase (Things that make you go hmm) to look for. Why do you expect to be listed first? The search engine is optimised based on what the search team thinks gives the best result for USERS, not for site owners. Why do you think most users searching for that phrase would be more interested in your page than all the others that contain the same phrase? It’s quite possible there’s room for tweaking there - there’s a large team of people that’s been working very hard on tweaking the engine since it was first brought online last year, and nobody at Yahoo! will claim there isn’t still a lot of room for improvement. But ask yourself those questions first - if you can’t give a clear, well defined answer, then there should be no reason to expect a specific result either..
- You ARE in the Yahoo! search engine: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=makeyougohmm.com&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&fl=0&x=wrt - so obviously it has been indexed. What have you been looking for in your logs? The Yahoo spider’s User-Agent is “Slurp”
- When searching for TDavid, why do you expect to get your site first? The fact that this string occurs so commonly all over the net, and relatively speaking few times on your front page means that there’s every reason to expect many users to expect other sites than yours if searching for it. Same issues as above apply.
- As for pinging Yahoo, if you mean that you ping the RSS spider for My Yahoo!, that is a different system than the web search engine and to my knowledge only affects the update of RSS feeds for users who have you added on their My Yahoo! RSS module.
- My immediate guess based on the search results is that our engine places more weight on the number of inbound links per second level domain than to the specific pages - that would explain the results. But I could be wrong.
I don’t know what you’ll have to do to optimize for the Yahoo! spider. I’d recommend you try posting a question on the Yahoo! search blog at http://www.ysearchblog.com/ - it is read by people on the engineering side of the search team, as well as by people interested in the Yahoo! search engine, and so you might be able to get someone who actually knows the engine or has been successfull at optimizing for it to comment. Note in particular that there’s an entry on the front page about a new search index being put live on March 31st, so your questions would be relevant.
If you don’t get any response on the Yahoo! search blog, feel free to mail me privately, and I can see if I can find someone in search engineering that can explain (in general teams - I doubt they’ll want to discuss specifics of the algorithm) why you’re having problems getting listed.
Comment by Vidar Hokstad — April 2, 2005 @ 7:25 pm PST
Vidar - Where did I ever say anywhere that I expected to be listed #1 for any of the specific examples I provided you with? I’d just like to be in the top 50-100 results. Studies have proven that those are about the max number of results most people searching will go through. As a practical matter I know not everything we do will be able to be in the top 100 because that’s where everybody wants to be, but for specific, related keyword searches — especially for those including my name which is part of my brand — this should be painstakingly easy to pull off.
But with Yahoo it’s not.
I would just like to be somewhere relevant in Yahoo and currently not just one but almost all our websites are buried completely underneath results that are not relevant or not listed at all period unles you do full domain searches (which are totally useless).
And yes, absolutely if you put in the makeyougohmm.com domain name exactly it will come up but really, is that a realistic, useful search someone would do?
What if the user doesn’t know the exact name of the domain and only know the author of the site and perhaps a title or subject? That’s my point. Those are the type of keyword-driven searches that should at least generate some results for this blog. There is some Yahoo traffic coming here, but it’s a tiny fraction of what Google and other search engines are sending. A9 sends more traffic than Yahoo and it was recently ranked #43.
I brought up several comparisons in my post above that were extremely specific and one that was vague to illustrate to you that Yahoo’s competitors *do* see this blog as relative and authoritative for one general set of keywords (”Things that make you go hmm”).
Vidar, please tell me how many “TD Scripts” or “TDavid scripts” you really think there are on the web? This is an easy search that practically any search engine on the planet should be able to find the primary result (my business site). I can write an algo in minutes to match the title of a homepage and part of the domain name and give it extra weighted relevance in a query.
Here they have a site that’s been on the web almost six years and an author/developer who has had the same name (that’s me) and linked back from articles and other publications to the site, not to mention the various programs that link back in the copyright. Still, Yahoo can’t find the site with a specifc query like that?
And the name “TDavid” is not a common phrase, I don’t know where you are drawing this knowledge from. It’s so uncommon, in fact, that the most search engines consider it to be a misspelling like Google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=tdavid&btnG=Search
and MSN:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&srch_type=0&q=tdavid
… and you’ll note that they suggest the alternate spelling “David.”
One of the principle reasons I’ve been using and branding the name “TDavid” for years is because of its relative uniqueness. Sure, there are some other ‘TDavid’s on the web, but they are definitely not out in the numbers that Yahoo’s search algos — or any decent search algos — shouldn’t easily be able to separate and find my websites in the majority of the results.
And yet that isn’t happening with Yahoo for some reason. And what about my own domain name: tdavids.com? Check out this search:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=TDavids&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&fl=0&x=wrt
Nowhere in the results (ranked in the top 50 results anyway) is the domain name and person who is actually behind the site — me — but instead people talking about the various websites that I’ve created are linked? (many of those results point to article or webpages I’ve personally created) Now, how relevant is that?
Since you’ve indicated that you don’t work on the search team and it’s obvious you aren’t familiar with any of our websites, perhaps it would be best if you got in touch with somebody from the search team yourself since you actually work at Yahoo and would have a better chance getting somebody that can actually do something about this scenario. And maybe they could check out my bio (you haven’t yet, it seems) review some of our many web properties and then read this post?
I think I’ve given ample information here that they should be able to research this and see what the problem might be.
As for Yahoo running Google results, yes I knew about that. Of course I was getting activity from them when that was happening, because it was Google’s results all along. Yahoo didn’t always use Google results and I’m using the timeframes in my commentary (I thought this was obvious?) going back to before the use of the Google results and after the Google search results. That’s what I have been saying: Google’s results have been superior to Yahoo’s in almost every case I’ve tried for a wide variety of keywords and it is the reason I cannot recommend them to anybody I know. I always thought the reason that Yahoo used Google’s results (when they originally added them) was because they couldn’t do as good a job. They gave up the fight and joined Google. Well, a year ago, they decided hey we have programmers and talent, we can do it better and are back on the fight. Again, I’ve been on the web and doing business a number of years, Vidar, so I feel fairly well educated on the history of major details like this.
Don’t you see the problem I have with Yahoo, Vidar? I should be able to find results when using very specific sets of keywords and adding my name to them. It’s not like I’m looking to rank on the front page for single word common keywords.
For example, let’s use the title of this article. I’m enclosing in quotes so all keywords are maintained. Shouldn’t I be able to find this in Yahoo?
But, wait, that same very specialized search in Google reveals:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22Yahoo+is+not+leading+Google%22+TDavid&btnG=Search
See, I can already find this article in Google that was written less than 48 hours ago. Why can’t I find this same article in Yahoo? That’s the problem, Vidar. Sure, it’s only been a short time, but if I’m going to use Yahoo as a search engine, shouldn’t I be able to find things with specific title/author searches like this?
Want an older example? Go back through older titles in this blog. Run those searches in Google and then run them in Yahoo and compare yourself. You’ll see what I’m talking about. Be sure to always enclose in quotes so all keywords must be present, that should narrow down the number of results significantly and rule out the common keyword results.
Lastly, I am a programmer myself, Vidar and I not only know what the Yahoo spider looks like, but the last time it’s been to one of our servers and to specific websites of ours. I wrote my own program which tracks all the traffic coming in and organizes it by day/date/hour so I can monitor all these stats with a click of the mouse. This is how I know that within the last week this site has been attacked by Russian spambots, the percentage of Mozilla to IE users has dipped slightly, how often googlebot stops by, and on and on and on
The problem isn’t — and hasn’t been — with Yahoo’s spider stopping by, it is what the spider does with the information it is slurping and how it’s being indexed.
From my point of view and repeated searches on a number of keywords, it’s not performing very well. If you truly work at Yahoo as you’ve indicated in whatever department you’re at, then please point this thread to somebody on the search engine team that can diagnose what’s going wrong here and advise me in this thread or privately — their choice.
I’m not an isolated case though, I just used me as an example because in my case I created the vast majority of pages I’m referencing in my commentary here to you and I have the ability to tweak/change them depending on the advice I’m given.
Again, I do thank you for taking time to write. I don’t dislike Yahoo. I’d like to see them improve their search, but the examples I’m giving here are all real world and need to be addressed by somebody. They aren’t unique to only searches I do on my own domains but for other people that I work with on the web as well.
I did briefly check out the blog and saw that Jeremy Zawodny is involved with that. I’ve been a long time reader and sometimes commenter at Jeremy’s blog. Awhile back I emailed him on another (unrelated) issue with Yahoo and he never responded. Maybe there are other, better contacts over there than Jeremy?
Feel free to contact me privately at tdscripts.com/contact.html, Vidar, if you have a better contact that I should be using. My Skype name is TDavid as well, if you use Skype.
Comment by TDavid — April 2, 2005 @ 8:50 pm PST
[…] I’ve compared Yahoo, MSN and Google main engines in detail here before and in the searches where I know the source material fairly well, Google has fared the best. Yes, Yahoo and MSN have improved, but let’s be serious about the #1 indicator of relevancy. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Who has a bigger penis, Google or Yahoo? — August 17, 2005 @ 11:23 am PST
[…] Another of Yahoo’s employees, or so he claimed, appeared in the comments here almost a year ago wondering why I thought a search on my name should show up some sites of ours prominently in the engines? When I elaborated that I thought a prominent result for our company should be there at the very least he never responded. […]
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