In what I'm sure will become a heavily linked to article, Tristan Louis offers up his recent analysis. I haven't had time to digest it fully, but his conclusions are:
- Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here's proof that they are getting results
- Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google
- While the front page of Google advertises they are currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is very difficult to find ways to support that claim via the link feature they are offering: this can be seen as confirmation that Google does not tell you about all the links it has in its index.
- Sure volume counts but in the case of search indexes, they may count against sites: if one is less likely to appear in Google than it is to appear in Yahoo! and the Google index is much larger than the Yahoo! one, then, if Yahoo! and Google had the same amount of traffic, a single blog could find itself receiving more traffic from Yahoo! than it does from Google. This would be due to the fact that each individual page in Yahoo! has more weight than it does in Google.
- The top 100 blogs have other 56 million links in the Yahoo!. That's a lot of links and clearly shows that links are the currency of the blogging world. It would be interested to get data that would help analyze how much interlinking exists across those sites.
Of course, that's the sort of stuff I like to read!
What has your experience been in using Yahoo! Search to find blog content?
Posted by jzawodn at June 20, 2005 09:26 PM
Well, I tried a sample search, one that was bugging me earlier today, actually.
The query is
seinfeld marketing.
Obviously, a very popular couple of words, and a lot of relevant pages could rank well.
A goofy article I wrote called "Everything I Know About Marketing, I Learned from Seinfeld" does not appear to rank in Google at all, at least not in the top 100 or so results. A few mentions of the article came up.
In Yahoo, as I just found, my article ranks #2 for this phrase.
Hooray Yahoo!
Seriously, though. We've been blogging busily for a long time now, using Blogger. I have noticed that our site in spite of being packed with content does not get that much Google traffic. It used to. Likely this is because our little blog entries are not being given much credit, for whatever reason... perhaps because there are so many of them... or whatever Google is doing with its algo.
I tried another query -- "Rageboy new site." Google's results are not as satisfying as Yahoo's here, either. Yahoo shows Chris Locke's new site, Chief Blogging Officer, in third place for this query. It doesn't show up anywhere prominent in Google for this query.
I do wonder if both Google and Yahoo will start to achieve these levels of relevancy over time as both companies begin to address personalization more seriously. If Yahoo (or Google) know who I am and what sorts of things I like and read every day, surely that would have to factor into the SERP's. My question is: how much *does* Yahoo know? With web beacons or by assessing the content on My Yahoo page (RSS feeds)... does Yahoo use that to affect SERP's if I am logged in with my Yahoo ID? Inquiring minds want to know.
I also feel yahoo image search is way better than that of google. For many keywords Google image search doesn't even return a result on the other hand yahoo manages to find atleast one or two.
cheers,
Badrinath.V.S :-)
>What has your experience been in using Yahoo! >Search to find blog content?
Who uses Yahoo! for Search? I just don't think "Yahoo!" when I think about doing a query. I think of Yahoo! when I think about Mail, IM, Movies, etc... but not search... Sorry.
Jack:
Why not?
Have you even *tried* our search? If so, what was wrong with it?
I am impressed!
Yesterday I was looking for details of a hotel in Hungary which is a member of the timesharing company RCI. All I had was the RCI number (2833).
I searched google for rci 2833 and got a Hungarian website. Searching Yahoo for the same keywords, I got the hotels' page on the RCI website first. In google, the RCI website is nowhere to be found in the first 10 pages.
On the other hand, searching Yahoo! for the Hebrew name of McDonalds brings a geocities webpage first and not the official website. For Hebrew, Google is still better.
But... all this is marginal here and there. Have you seen http://exalead.com ? They are taking search to radical places and are really good and I am sure they will get better.
Google Image Search is definitely better though i also like Amazon Search too(maybe it uses google).
Check out query "Amar Agrawal" in all image searches ..
Yahoo returns none!!
So!! No search engine is perfect .. just suite ur needs.
For example, I use ..
Google : Academic, General search
Amazon : Image, Movie search
Yahoo : none, right now (thgh I hv tried it a couple of times)
Wikipedia : For quick information on any topic.
Google: It's far far easier to get listed in their directory (and we're talking DMOZZZ here).
Yahoo: If you pay an arm and a leg, annually, maybe. Otherwise, there doesn't appear to be anybody home.
Its getting better, but it comes from a pretty poor base so that's not exactly a difficult statement to justify. my recent playing around with Yahoo! nearly has me convinced that you can match Google. The problem your facing is weening us all off Google, from the Google toolbar through to all the other features as well and years of habitual use. You could start by taking some tips from GMail and that'd help as well...
I did a search for myself, and came up repeatedly in the top ten, which is nice.
It suggested I might have been looking for Andrew Decker (who's been in a movie or 4, so that seems reasonable).
What's less reasonable is that the ads at the top were already _for_ Andrew Decker. If I'm searching for something unusual, why show me ads for something else unless I agree that that was what I was looking for?
This is more or less the same thing for me. I'm using Yahoo for my mailing lists, for Flickr :P, but when it comes to web searching, Google just pops in mind.
Back in 1997/98 if I remember I was using Yahoo with its "portal/directory" form, and I switched to Google and their cleaner interface. I have to confess that I found about search.yahoo.com's similar interface a short time ago, and it's really pretty good and relevant. It just doesn't, well, pop into mind when I have to search about something.
There are indeed a few more or less cosmetic and minor details I don't really like on Yahoo. For example, I find the search query string on Google more logical with a 'q' parameter than a 'p'. It seems quite standard on every search engine that the query is a 'q=whatyousearch', and I guess it tends to be more traffic-and-referrer-tool analysis compliant (for example, Textism's Refer simply doesnt list Yahoo amongst search queries that have lead to one's site)
Another thing I don't really like on Yahoo : their weird URLs everywhere, like rds.blah.yahoo.com/RD=LOL/WTF=FFS/ etc..
Another thing that is probably keeping Google in my mind as a search engine is that the search engine referrers on my humble blog are 90% from Google (a few from aol and msn, some from netscape (go figure), and practically nothing from others)
This said, I'm really looking forward to using Yahoo more. A few month ago I had a dinner with a friend who is working for Yahoo, and we had sort of a "Yahoo vs Google" mini debate that made me wanting to give Yahoo a few tries. Since, I've been adding a few Yahoo related feeds in my reader, and I have to admit I really like what I'm learning from these now.
- What is wrong with Yahoo! search (and many other yahoo offerings) is that they are slow. There can be no debate over google's speed .... its fassssstt...
- yahoo search has a good feature of opening the search result in a separate window. How about detecting the users browser (at least firefox/safari) and offering a similar thing for tabs ?!
- yahoo! news again doesn't cluster results ? Is that sooo tough...
While there are some issues with yahoo! search... they have surely done well in terms of the time and effort (they have other things on the plate too) they have put into it. As far as the search market I heard numbers like the split being 35-30-13% for goog-yhoo-msn. Is that correct ?
Not using it: Because I dislike the fact that you track the clicks.
I can switch languages on the fly (All, German). Hint: "Search: the Web Preferred Languages" Does not take into account that I want either German or English but not all or all preferred languages.
When searching in Google, it does at least bring up the natural language of a word first, ie when searching a german word, I do get presented German entries first.
And third: Presented results at Google match what I was looking for nearly all of the time, Yahoo results don't. So when I get presented the things I probably wanted to have, I don't really care that you present me more results.
As a blogger: 95 up to 99% of my traffic comes from Google, several thousand a month.
Comparing some of my hit terms, I do receive mainly vendors as result in Yahoo, and content pages in Google.
While your new slider about less shopping is nice, this is additional effort for me as a searcher. It does not help, if I can achieve the same kind of result on your search engine if I click several switches - as long as Google does give me the answers I wanted right away, Google is easier to use.
When Google does not provide me what I am searching for, which is maybe one out of 100 searches, I do use other search engines. But I am more likely to use MSN. Why? See reason number one why I don't use Yahoo ...
With blogs -- Yahoo!. Heck, Google doesn't even show post descriptions in case of LJ posts.
When it comes to generally searching, I play around with both.
Well, it's probably true that Yahoo has more coverage than the other blog-specific search engines, but it would be useful too if you could search for links to a particular site, the way Technorati does.
in general, i use the following for blog search:
- Feedster
- Technorati
- Icerocket
- PubSub (occasionally)
i haven't found Yahoo or Google to be very good at blog search, although i do use Google for some news search & tracking (mainly via the Google Alerts service)
I think it is hard to say which search engine is the best. I have had greater success with blog content search in Yahoo, but then Yahoo has so much spam in its results. Google does index some of the large websites rather quickly but during last couple of weeks, Google's results are full of spam too. So far MSN provides good results from static page but nothing much to praise when it comes to blogs.
I'd like to see BLOGS as a search category next to web, images, video and so. That would be killer.
When I go to feedster, technorati or del.icio.us to search for something, it is 100% related to blogs and buzz, not shopping, or corporate pages or anything else than blogs.
Blog ego? perhaps. It is undeniable that people likes to know what everybody else is talking about and linking and refering to, in a "social" way, not a commercial way.
;-)
Jeremy,
funny you should ask for people's experiences with search... I just posted something on this exact topic a couple of days ago:
http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net/blog1archive/001716.html
Executive summary: I'm finding more and more frequently that Google is failing to get the 'right' link in the #1 position for a given search, whereas Y! hits it much more consistently. This is a complete reversal of what was originally attractive about Google in the first place (i.e. you didn't have to wade through pages of 'kinda sorta relevant' stuff to find exactly the link you were searching for).
My post is only about one case of this but I've been doing more side by side searches since then and it keeps happening...
Oh, BTW, I'd like to have an API (REST-ful) to get queries about blogs and only blogs. Just like Y!Q but for blogs.
Double killer!
;-)
As a blogger with an obvious bias for Google, I've gotta give the advantage to Yahoo in terms of blog search recency, but I'm not so sure about relevance.
A couple months ago I did my own non-scientific study of search recency when Steve Gillmor coined the term "syndisphere." After 30 hours in the wild, "syndisphere" appeared in Yahoo and MSN, but not Google. Give it 60 hours, though, and Google indexed more than twice as many as Yahoo. Today, after about 1,700 hours in the wild, Yahoo is showing twice as many results as Google. But who's searching for this term now, anyway. In this case, recency trumps depth and relevance.
As far as relevance goes, I'm thrilled that Yahoo gives my small site top billing. I've written a lot on "Google TV" on my blog, for example. Search for this term in Yahoo, and my site will be #3 of 37,200. Search in Google and I'm not in the top 200. You'll find sites that link to me on almost every results page, but not my site itself.
Selfishly, I'd want give Yahoo the advantage on relevance as well. But is this really the right result? Does my puny site deserve top placement at Yahoo, when there are far more authoritative sources than mine? After all, a lot of my stuff is just groundless speculation. Maybe Google actually demotes sites if they determined to be blogs in order to improve relevance and avoid blog pollution.
I never use Yahoo for search, but posts like these make me consider trying it again. As Nicole pointed out above, however, your results links go to a click tracker, not to the actual matching page. This should change.
Instead of my experience searching via Y! Search (since I don't), here's my experience as a blogger *being searched* from Yahoo:
http://jclark.org/weblog/WebDev/ThisSite/toodleooyahoo.html
Summary: In January, I blocked the Yahoo! Slurp spider because it was requesting long, impossible URLs and because it was requesting 4x the pages Google requests, but only sending me 4% of the search hits Google provides.
If Yahoo! Search continues to gain popularity, I may need to reconsider this policy (on the assumption that the ROS (Return on Spidering) will increase, but first I may need to figure out how to prevent Slurp from getting lost on my site in a way no other spider does.
With blogs being a bit different in terms of frequency of updates and tendency to link out, I am surprised Yahoo! doesn't have a dedicated blog search engine yet. Check out - http://blogs.yandex.ru - and this is from a major Russian search engine. Of course, Technorati is there, but, like your post says, there's room to improve upon Technorati, plus Yahoo! could add certain other features, such as integration into My Yahoo!
One noob's perspective: Y! Search's secret weapon is the ability to block junk sites that come up in search and provide no value. After switching to using Y! search exclusively in the past two months, it's the one feature I've run across that makes me say "Y! vs. Google search is *not* like the difference between coke and pepsi -- the personalization in Y! search makes it demonstrably better, and we need to get better about telling people about this."
As a webmaster, I use G and Y quite regularly for search, but Jeremy's question here isn't about general search, it's about searching for blog content. And it would never occur to me to use Y or G for that; blog search is best handled by the likes of Technorati and others (see Dave McClure's post above).
On a semi-related note, my little niche sports blog fares pretty well in both Y and G and I get about equal traffic from the two.
My personal experience is that contrary to Louis' conclusions, Yahoo is biased against blogs. My own personal site refuses to appear as high in Yahoo search results as in Google's, even if I am searching for my own name (random pages that link to my website appear higher). This is likely to be the reason that I get far more traffic from Google than Yahoo (over 2400 from Google this month; 2 from Yahoo).
Jeremy,
Nothing is wrong with Yahoo! Search as far as I know - it's just that old habits die hard.
Even Russell was using Google for search until recently...
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008510.html
Jack
It would be nice if yahoo search had some shorter address.. it sucks to type in search.yahoo.com every time (I know of browser hints etc.)
And one reason Yahoo search has problems with getting outside of the English-speaking world is its name. My mom can barely spell google (and she's not alone: gogle.pl, a Polish site that redirects searches to google gets around one million unique visitors (!) a month). s-e-a-r-c-h is out of question.
(no Polish jokes please)
Interesting timing of the analysis. Look at http://wiki.apache.org/nutch/Presentations for Doug Cutting's MapReduce in Nutch presentation to be given to Yahoo! search folks.
Otis
Oh if we talk about current blog content like from today, of course different "search engines" a to be used.
But with everything older than one - two days, I don't have problems in finding most of the stuff in google, or bloglines.
I have doubts about the analysis. The Google and Yahoo totals are both estimates (always ending in 00 is a bit of a tipoff), and I know for sure that Google's estimates sometimes have only a vague resemblance to the actual number of results. Maybe Yahoo's estimates are even further off.
You all do know twingine, do you?
http://twingine.com/search.php?q=jeremy+zawodny
http://exalead.com/ is one of the coolest search engines I've seen in a long time. Would most definately switch over to it.
I found this quite interesting --- my small consultancy is, "foo, co." (as an example).
I use "fooco" (contraction of my company's full name) as my moniker at several programming forums and at selected other sites, forums, whatnot.
Google results for "fooco" generally consist of a listing of my posts at these various forums, especially the ones that are larger and more well-known.
search.yahoo.com (which I hadn't visited in, well, eons of 'Net time) had, as it's number 1 result, *my company website*.
I don't generally swear, but, d*** was I impressed with this one.... If Mozilla gave an options for their "address bar search", it might just be changing for me Real Soon Now(tm)....
I have always google solely for search and continue to do so. However, yahoo definitely seems to be better at searching blogs(my little blog doesnt even register on google while it does on yahoo). In fact I am extremely impressed at yahoo's blogosphere reach, and nowadays I occasionally try out yahoo for general search too. So far, I stil think google is better overall, but yahoo is certainly good, and it is possible I will make a switch one day.
I thing the yahoo index is far away from googles. For example yahoo lists content of pages which were deleted half a year ago, the pages dont exist actually.
Thats not true. For example the page http://www.cliff-diving.ch/ is not in the google index but much more better in the yahoo index.
Becoming a webmaster changed my view of which search engine to use. I now prefer Yahoo, and here is why.
If I want to find something that has a fairly crowded field of web pages Google will never find it. The fact that they rank pages by the number of other pages kills finding pages that don't have a lot of links to them. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad.
Yahoo on the other hand undestands that link popularity isn't everything. It's far easier to find obscure pages or pages you really want in Yahoo.
Yahoo finds my new website and within the first ten found. I really think Google is avoiding my website in their search results by design. My site is of the highest quality though controversial. At one time if I typed in the website title, google would show it on the 18th page of results. Now it doesn't within 25. My site is an individual vs. institutional types. My question is: what is going on here? Are there forces involved here that can be talked about?
Recently yahoo has managed to show better results than google. There seems to be somthing wrong with google. I think they have changed their algo and because of this more spammers are getting top listings. Its ironic to see such lame results coming out of google. Even if you type a phrase containing "google" it will show absolutely irrelevant stuff. Its kind of easy to fool google nowadays. Fake page names, garbage text hidden in bg color. Recently i uploaded a few sites and to my amaze i couldnt get any listing in google even if i typed the complete URL. Yahoo, however, shows instant results. Quicker in indexing and much more relevent in result displays...
In Yahoo it is simple to find backlinks, but Google return only little part of all backlinks.
