Jeremy Zawodny is asking for feedback on how to revamp (improve) Yahoo Groups and several people mentioned an obvious weakness in his comments:

Richard Fairhurst: “Better searching within groups, obviously. Also, better searching _for_ groups. I lose track of the number of times I’ve known that a group exists but have failed to find its URL by searching.”
Mike Woodhouse: “Well, search should go without saying, but I’ll say it again anyway.”
Deb: FIX THE SEARCH!!
BillyG: “I joined a Group about 6 months ago only to recv the emails and when I went to search thru the earlier postings, it totally sucked so I wound up leaving the Group. I tried again about 2-3 months ago; 5 mins later, I knew I was never going back.”
Akilesh: “Please fix the search…”
Carolyn: “Searching the archives rarely returns known archived material. The older the material is, the harder it is to find.”
Eric: “Better search.”
Bill Seiltz: “… I’ll second that “search message archives” emotion.”
Danny: “Make it easier to find stuff. (1) Regular search is the obvious one, it’s currently very weak.”
Manoj Agarwal: “Before geting in new features, I think the present search provided in the group should be made better.”
Rob Sanheim: “Search! Please, add search first … Get a working search feature …”
John K: “Fix the search.”
Russell Gum: “much better search”
Andrew: “A search function that actually works!”
TechMBA: “#1. Search! I want to be able to search messages in my group. We can talk about a thousand things later, but first, let us have a functional group.”
Ryan: “… search should be priority #1.”
Saul: “Above all: Search. Why in a search company can’t I search through all the messages in a group in an easy way?”

Of the 70 comments as of this writing, 17 mentioned search. Add me to the mix and you have 18 / 71 or 25.4%. One quarter of those who took time to respond to Jeremy gave search as a suggestion. I hope somebody writes that on a blackboard in gigantic letters for the Y! Groups team to review.

The search within Yahoo groups just isn’t very good and the search outside is worse. It’s a good example of why some people have given up on Yahoo services because they don’t go all the way to solving our problems as users. It seems to some of the rest of us who don’t work for Yahoo that they do a lot of new things and then let the other stuff (some of it really promising) just sit and grow stale. I hope that doesn’t happen to their acquisitions, but they don’t exactly have a stellar track record there either.

On a positive note It is encouraging to see Jeremy soliciting feedback now so let’s hope we actually see something beside a design change come out of these comments. Cosmetic changes might be nice to look at, and to my knowledge this was the last significant thing done to Yahoo Groups, but it’s the features and functionality — and search is huge — that really keep people around. If something we find useful isn’t bookmarked, then how do we quickly and easily find this again? Work on solving that problem.

And what about Yahoo main search?
Curiously, Jeremy and I disagree that the Yahoo main search is on par with Google. Let me show you a scorecard of just one of many ways that I arrive at this conclusion:

This is a screenshot of third party referrer stats from Site Meter as of this writing. You can follow my link and look at it any time you want at any time of the day and the results will be similar. Look at what search engine is sending the traffic. It’s not Yahoo or MSN or Ask, it’s Google. I went through the most recent 100 referrers as of this writing and Yahoo didn’t even send one visitor. Topix.net sent a couple visitors, Ask sent a few, MSN a few, but zero from Yahoo. When will this blog — heck, when will any of our websites — start getting some Yahoo search love?

I’m not a spammer, I create original content, have been around the web for 10+ years creating content and I can’t seem to push the right buttons to get Yahoo love. What’s the magic formula? What am I doing so wrong?

You might wonder why I focus on such a small, specific example — our own websites — (is this really fair, you might think?), but the answer is I know our websites better than Yahoo does. I cannot use Yahoo to search for past archives reliably but I can and do use Google. Google will have the content I write here available within 48-72 hours in their search.

Recently, I was asked by another search company what would get me to use their search — it’s a question I’ve been asked at least a dozen times over the years — and the answer is always the same:

Make it the most relevant search for my query.

I know, I know, it’s a doh moment, but Google’s competitor’s just don’t seem to comprehend this. Is Google perfect? Hell no, but their search is more relevant for the searches that matter to me and apparently others too because it shows in the number of people that continue to make Google their default search of choice [see recent search stats, via John Battelle]

When traffic starts to show in these publically available stats and I do test searches and find what I’m looking for right away then I will know Yahoo is making progress. And it’s not just this blogs of ours, BTW, that I’m basing this on, we have numerous other non-blog sites and the results are similar across all our sites. Yahoo sends a little traffic here and there but nothing on the level of Google. MSN is actually getting better, it’s noticeable.

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.

The question isn’t why, it’s why not?

Well, let me see … maybe I think this because my name is somewhat unique (”TDavid”) and my name + my company is the only one on the web with that name, at least that I’m aware of anyway. So how difficult should it be for Yahoo to make this obvious to find in their search? Like somewhere in the top 10? Shouldn’t it be? Apparently it’s real difficult because a year has gone by and nothing has changed:

TDavid - not in the top 10
“tdavid scripts” - not in the top 10
“td scripts” - not in the top 10

If our customers can’t find us in your search when the result is unique, Yahoo, how good is that?

I don’t really expect anybody from Yahoo to contact me this time around. A year didn’t do any good when I made a statement here about it and the five preceeding years where Yahoo search for our company has sucked hasn’t changed anything. So what good is another year?

Still, every time I see somebody trying to make the argument that Yahoo search is on par with Google I come back to these same real world conclusions that they are at best #2, and soon to be #3 if MSN keeps the fire burning. Go get them, MSN, they are there for the taking.

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