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Google Propping Up Yahoo In Search Results?
c170 writes: "The position of results that point to Yahoo's pages have changed since Google and Yahoo inked their alliance." Definitely an interesting article, but not really enough statistics to prove anything ... still, definitely enough to keep your eyes peeled in the future.
What does this mean? Only the little green men can say.
Yes, this was a mistake, and should have been further researched before committing to the story. OTOH, stuff like this keeps people on their toes and gets them thinking, or maybe even gets a newbie to read up on software licensing, which earns more collective knowledge for the community.
Run for the hills! Google is pimping Yahoo!
You might not care, and I would bet that most people don't care, but I sure as hell do, and many other people do too. No, I'm not suggesting we make some absurd law to prevent this, but now that I know, I can make an informed choice on whether or not I support this business model, and I don't. It's a matter of principle, just like many of the privacy issues you see argued here on Slashdot.
A private company decided not to publish DeCSS -- it's the end of free speech as we know it!
Again, I like to know what's going on with public opinion about the issues that are important to me.
*Red Alert* Corporations try to make money *Red Alert*
We've all seen this one before, probably many times before. I'll admit that some of the Slashdot community is very immature and/or anal about particular issues, but then again, if you don't like it, you don't have to read Slashdot. Maybe you're better off reading ZDNet or some other news site that can't think for itself.
Wow, I may need to add a whole new category on my page !
Thanks!
NEAR is my favorite search operator, i.e. cow NEAR brown
The only place I know that supports it is altavista. Does any other engine support "NEAR" ?
I just did a quick search on a couple of my pages. Searches for either "bat house" or "bat poetry" list my pages first. Of course the subject is a bit specialized... :-)
http://batbox.org/
I don't think very many regular web users know about Google, and Yahoo is trying to be proactive and doing something before they start losing eyeballs. This way anyone defecting to Google would still be getting search results pointing to Yahoo... some may click on them even.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
CT can definately spell.
Now we'll just have to start working on peel and its derivations.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
WebFerret lives locally on your Window$ box and meta-searches 12 of the major search engines simultaneously.
Since ZDNet ate WebFerret's parent company, when you use the latest release of WebFerret, any search whatsoever always returns five links for the search topic into ZDNet-owned search/directory services, no matter the fact that many times these five ZDNet links will contain absoulutely no links outward to pages relevant to your search topic.
I just entered v,>0ads43# into a WebFerret search, and it promptly returned:
http://www.search.com/search?q=v,%3E0ads43%23&chan nel=1&ref=wfv,>0ads43#
Complete list of v,>0ads43# sites. Not Rated
http://cnet.search.com/search?q=v,%3E0ads43%23&ref =wfv,>0ads43# - technology
Comprehensive technology info on v,>0ads43#. Not Rated
http://www.help.com/cgi-perl/search.pl?query=v,%3E 0ads43%23v,>0ads43# - help
Help and discussion on v,>0ads43#. Not Rated
http://download.cnet.com/downloads/1,10150,0-10001 -103-0-1-7,00.html?qt=v,%3E0ads43%23&cn= &ca=10001v,>0ads43# - downloads
Free v,>0ads43# downloads. Not Rated
http://news.cnet.com/news/search/results/1,10199,0 -1002,00.html?qt=v,%3E0ads43%23&cn=&ca=1 002
v,>0ads43# - news
Recent v,>0ads43# news. Not Rated
(And no, WebFerret didn't find any other hits for v,>0ads43# ;-)
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I for one, have not noticed any decrease in the relevance of a given search on google, and I use it incessantly. Leave them alone and let them make their money sans banner ads.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Nothing like a good holy war to spice up search engines.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
What about listen.com?
AARGH! I was looking for pages about a band (can't remember which), and my google results kept coming up with lots of results like "foo-listen.com", which when you clicked on them all redirected to listen.com.
Grumble.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
--
Google does do advertising, yes, but it is obvious - they do not attempt to hide it like some search engines.
So, uhh, call me selfish, but this is good for me and therefore I fully endorse this move. =)
--
It seems to be that there is a cynical bias on this issue. I personally have a theory that is not based on a mis-appropriation of google results, but rather pure technical know how. Since Yahoo partnered with google, they need to have their information indexed. It makes sense that google has most of it indexed, but it's unlikely that every page yahoo has generated is in google's index. So, google needs to index every page they have. It only makes sense that google would have more accurate results by thoroughly indexing yahoo. The issue that people are having is that the yahoo index isn't sectioned off into it's own little cluster, but part of the larger index in google. It's simply the fact that google has a more complete index of the yahoo pages, not because yahoo is paying for search results.
The Google directory uses the Open Directory for it's Web directory.
Google also has the largest database so it seems unlikely that altavista will ever find more results (unless it's spam or duplicates)
As one who only occasionally dabbles in conspiracies as a passing hobby, I object to the improved ranking only as a knee-jerk reaction. I was one of the last to know about Yahoo listing results for money, and that was what really caused me to leave for Google. The results were worth the move. Although I had noticed more Yahoo pages showing up, I'm still finding what I want faster than before. I'm still mostly finding stuff on the first link or first page. As long as I keep finding what I'm looking for quickly, I'll keep using Google. When I start finding advertising pushed before content (like Yahoo previously) I'll move. The early Google served a need that others had forgotten. If they forget, someone will reinvent the wheel. And I'll ride that one.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
Methinks I've been one-upped :) I'll have to get me some of that Mozilla stuff.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
If you're using Netscape, you can go to the Netscape Search page and set up Google to always be your search engine. In Netscape 4.x, this is the flashlight icon on the tool bar. Then you can do Google searches by typing '? search terms' in the Location: box. It's very convenient and skips having to go to any other page.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Yes! I started noticing this last week or so. In fact, when I saw this story on /., I had to look into it find out if I was the only one seeing this epinions weirdness. I didn't write down the searches I used, but there was a variety of them that led to epinions' home page, for no discernible reason.
-- Michael Chermside
I guess I'll do my searches -yahoo from now on.
--------------
Brooks138
Writing an X client in Python - or Java - is a fairly stupid idea, incidentally. X is slow enough as it is without needing interpretive overhead care of the implementation language.
Java is like a master magician whereas Python is like a prentice mage.
I should stop replying to trolls.
Note that there's a huge difference between "large enough to be obvious to me" and something that is happening across the board, on all searches. It's like flipping a coin and noticing that in 10 flips, 8 times it landed on heads, and concluding from that that the coin is rigged. Is it not also completely possible that the coin is not rigged? I haven't seen a single match on google for eopinions. I don't even know what eopinions is. This suggests to me that this is a localized phenom. where eopinions scores well on the searches you run.
Good for geeks of course. If you attend one type of people mostly is easier to do it very well. :-)
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
What do you /. readers prefer for a search engine? I prefer Google. Gets the job done easily with no clutter of useless features like Yahoo! Mail, Games, Credit Cards, all that other junk. Yeah I know this is kinda off topic, so please go easy on me moderators :)
-PovRayMan
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
I feel your pain regarding most not reading the article, but I digress.
.edu domain anyway, thus saving myself from tons of commericalized content.
Before we jump to conclusion, wouldn't it be nice if a slashdot staff can attempt to reach google and get a decent explainataion for why this is happening?
I have always wondered how easy it will be to fool page ranking technology, by having a lot of bogus pages link to you. If yahoo is high, then pages that yahoo point to must be rated somewhat high, if I can get those pages to point to my pages, i can earn high mark as well. I am only guessing. Hopefully google will fix this problem, when I do specializes searchs. I usually only search in the
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Taco takes job at MicroSoft!
Best Slashdot Co
the peeling of the bells?
At least keeping our eyes pealed answers the age old question of what the sound of green is.
:-P
I've been following the wonderful world of search engines for several years in my role as web educator and maintainer for a University library. Skewed results seem to be an inevitable part of commercial engines - Alta Vista, et. al. were doing it long before Google burst on the scene. One of the great weaknesses of the Internet is the inadequacy of search engines and directories in support of serious research. While librarians seem to think that they could nicely organize the whole thing, I have my doubts that Dublin Core metadata or some extension of MARC into site classification will ever solve the problem. That said, Google is still probably the best general, "comprehensive" search tool available today. Expecting dispassionate morality from a business entity, however, is naive -- so naive that I'm a bit surprised that SlashDot's cynical staffers find it noteworthy. If you'd like to dip into the sordid world of internet search tools check out Search Engine Watch -- it's a good starting point to find out about business relationships as well as characteristics and performance of the various engines.
"When I grow up, I'll be stable."
How about this?
Google might not only measure links to pages, but also counts users which use a link to a page. If Yahoo feeds in link hits from Yahoo directory users, than Yahoo sites will go up in the google rankings.
From a business perspective Yahoo has every power to demand from their search machine provider, to rank their pages high. Advertising is Yahoo's main income stream. Feeding in link hits could be a way to do it in a more soft way. It could explain the slow change of rankings, if the data given isn't wrong.
Or, you could just include "-yahoo.com" in the normal search field.
How narrow is Google's definition of Authority, or how broadly does a high ranking apply?
If it isn't narrow enough, it would be easier for all the random Yahoos to skew Google's results away from genuinely good medical sites.
I suspect this is a matter of tuning, and Google has massively skewed their data collection by adding Yahoo, so they will need some time to correct for it.
I still highly doubt that Google is selling ranking postions, as that would send us off to the next search engine, (and there will be more & more intellegent search engines.)
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
For that sort of data, all you need is a very fast text search. You mean like grep? :)
i have misplaced my signature.
On August 22nd and 23rd, I asked Yahoo to search for "asfrecorder". It came up with *0* hits. I then went directly to Google and did the same search. It came up with 59 hits.
I complained to Yahoo about the lack of hits on their site, and after several exchanges on this, they stopped replying to my email.
I note that today Yahoo comes up with 45 hits, while Google comes up with 181 hits.
Lesson to be learned: if you want Google results, go directly to Google.
I'd fogotten about than bookmark-javascript stuff, but I'd never thought of this...
I hate to ask, but can it be made to work with IE?
If my wording was a little stong, it is because I am sick of seeing comments on slashdot with no real content other than pure speculation being moderated up. Didn't mean to offend, but you also could have made your comment really informative (+3) by including some examples. With so many a-hole trolls and flamebaiters posting trash on /. these days, it is hard to pick out real comments from junk.
Anyway, have a jolly day.
mailto:spacecow10@hotmail.com
.org from the end of my email? I guess I just don't get where you are coming from with this.
I'm tired of people anti-spamming their hotmail accounts.
spacecow10@hotmail.com
I'm posting anonymously because I'm moderating.
What is the big deal? Why does this bother you? Yes, I get 5-10 spam emails a day on hotmail anyway, but do I want more? No. Do I use the built in spam filter? Yes. Are you posting this because you honestly want to email me and are pissed cause you have to cut off
I think you are mistaken. Here is a simple experiment (disclaimer: this is a product I wrote an epinions review for):
Google Search
Resulting Epinions link
This is not a link to the main epinions page. It is a link for the exact item searched for. Here is anothe r one. My advice to you: put up or shut up. Really, instead of just saying you have noticed something, prove it and people might listen.
I guess it's back to Altavista.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
I'll admit, though -- for the AOL crowd, Google is certainly the way to go.
Got Rhinos?
When I was using Infoseek as my primary search engine I'd notice the amount of broken links would climb for 4-6 months, then become perfectly clean. I was noticing google's effectiveness lessen and was hoping that it was for the same reason.
:(
Looks like I was wrong
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Those eight little words that mean Southern hospitality...You ain't from around here, are ya, boy?
That was an interesting seach engine. Too bad it's not around anymore. I used to use Altavista since it's days of http://altavista.digital.com...before they ever bought the altavista.com domain.
I seriously have to think whether to keep using them or not, since they did the major design change of the site. Even if you enter an obscure query, you still get a page and a half of links to their sponsors and partners. That's gettingh to be a bit too much for me.
Shawn
Not to mention that the links produced by a search are all redirects through srd.yahoo.com
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I prefer GOOGLE. Since I've started using it, that's my search engine of choice. Absolutely extraordinary. For science and math it rocks. Only yesterday I had to check on how SAS supports MANOVA procedure. Did Google search, got the set of results, sorted by the order of relevancy, everything was just great. Don't know how they do it. Sort of a magic.
A couple days after the Yahoo-Google story came out, I noticed 3 or 4 of my usual searches changed in order. But I would say this is probably more coincidence than intentional, Google's new code probably better filters out search engine spammers like Hardin MD.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
The google search starts by assuming a set of "Authoritative" start pages that web-surfers start on and occasionainally jump back to, then rank pages based on how much time these hypothetical web-surfers spend on each page. It turns out to matter surprisingly little which the start pages are, but moving yahoo into the list could explain these results, but be relatively innocent.
For God's sake, it's spelled "peeled."
I mean, really. Python might be a "cool" language for the "geek" community, but should it really be used to create industrial strength websites ? Surely something like Java would be more appropriate, since it has been used for 5 years running for industrial strength E-solutions.
This whole open-source movement is going over the top. There are geeks out there talking about Python and Perl instead of industrial strength languages like Java. This just isn't right folks, because while Python might be fun, could it really replace the power and reliability of the Java platform? I dunno.no sig
Well, could you write a fully functional X server in Python? Could you write an industrial strength Ecommerce application like the one controlling the prestigious Ford Website? Could you write your own version of Java in Python? Na-uh. While there might be similarities in the philosophies of the two languages, power seperates them. Java is like a master magician whereas Python is like a prentice mage.
no sig
WTF?? "not really enough statistics to prove anything"
So? 74% of all statistics are made up anyway...
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I use the Copernic search engine at work,which searches a range of search engines depending
on what criteria you wish to search on
It even has a search engine for programming,and of course slashdot is amongst the computer sites they search for content!
Its not particulary elegant, but it does seem to produce good results.
As it use google as well as many other search engines it provides a more comprehensive set of results than google on its own.
It's not that. You apparently didn't read the story. It's because he has what looks like very convincing evidence that Google is now showing a preference for Yahoo-preferred advertising sites rather than most-frequently-visited sites as before. This is a case of diluting the net's real content in favor of marketing. Yahoo should be spanked. Google should be spanked. But not by some official action. People should just start using real high-quality search engines rather than artificial preference filters that you get with Yahoo.
I didn't see any flakiness in his numbers at all. He knows what real researchers use. He knows that google used to reflect that, and thus was a good resource to give to real researchers. Now, instead, google is reflecting what marketdroids at Yahoo want it to. That's bad for real researchers who now can't get things done.
Son, all I was trying to do is to see if people were experiencing similar things or if I just had a bad run of luck, while noting that my own personal experience reminded me of the bad old days. I wasn't accusing anyone of anything.
Herbie J.
As I read it the linking method that google uses count a link as a vote - The article makes an interesting point:
The linkages from medical/health specialists are far more considered and thus higher 'quality' recommendations than the general mass of links. What you may have is a bunch of know-nothings wanting to link to health resources and thus linking to Yahoo - this mass of 'junk links' then outweighs the quality links that really help you find quality resources.What would be cool is an expansion of the dmoz/google collaboration and valued the links from sites identified by the human editors as the best ('starred sites') more highly than the rest.
In the long run we should be able to specify our interest group and have a google style link popularity system based on links from that interest group (what sites with the keyword DeCSS are linked to most by sites run by members of slashdot/ the sites most frequently used by people at our company (stay in the loop)
Obviously the associations would be voluntary (and may be a sellable item) Sadly I do think that the tie up between Google and Yahoo will have affected their ranking system.
Cheers
James I am a dmoz editor
But oddly enough, it seems Google is still using DMoz for their own directory. Hopefully they won't switch that to Yahoo.
honestly, from AOL's perspective...(Not Mine)
fsck them.
AOL is not about to compromise $$$ to become impartial or, hell, even accurate.
Cheers,
T
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
...they're all from Stanford
Too Much Corporate Power
click here to incinerate homeless people
So has Google passed it's half-life? That graph looks pretty exponential to me. Fortunately I've got a doog enough connection that I don't mind digging a bit through bs links, but it's still a pain. Hopefully either google will straighten up, or someone will write a better engine, and let darwin decide things. (Anyone care to rise to the occasion?)
-Space for rent
Two companies, joined at the wallet, working together you say? Trying to make money, huh? Well I'll be damned. I never expected companies to try and make money.
-------------------------------------------------
I had a quick look myself using "hematology" as they did in the original survey. It looks a lot less concerning than they make out - there still seem to be plenty of directory sites. Perhaps they're suggesting that the MedWebPlus site has been singled out for negative treatment? Seems a bit paranoid.
One interesting result from my test is that the dmoz Open Directory page is ranked higher than Google's own copy. At least they don't seem to be favouring their own pages.
Finally, here's a tip for anyone concerned about this alleged favouring of Yahoo pages: exclude Yahoo from the search by using the advanced search options, or by including "-site:yahoo.com" in the query terms.
Write a whole story because someone tried to make a profit by making an alliance!!!
Hyperbole? I guess you've never browsed ZDNet's user comments? And ZDNet's is moderated, we only get to see what they pick... I wonder what it's like raw!
I'm not joking: the high presence of yahoo links in Google's search results may depend on their scoring system. Google uses page ranks (basically the more a page is linked the more it is scored) and referring link text. Yahoo pages are a lot linked from outside, as usually all pages of links point to the corresponding yahoo category, making them have a high score. In fact also in the Google beginnings (I'm using Google since '98) yahoo links were very popular in the results, it's nothing of new.
Lara Croft dates hardcore perl programmers? Looks like I'm goana have to take up a new hobby.
If you bothered to search for baskin robbins ice cream (notice that it's "baskin" not "basking") then www.baskinrobbins.com is the first item on the list. Please be more thorough next time...
- Alex
A good move since Inktomi was such a pain to use, but even Yahoo's interface isn't as nice as going straight to the Google's mouth. (A tip of the lid to those /.ers who pointed me to the big G)
Yahoo is actually doing pretty well, considering how much I find it a service to use sparingly. Mostly for maps, quick check of the news and people search.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I personally haven't noticed a difference in the sites Google returns since it's deal with Yahoo. I still get all the rare sites as before. I do like Yahoo too, but I use Google for the really hard to find sites.
;)
Google is the only site where I can type my own name in and get old websites of mine that I no longer maintain, or old posts to message boards, it's kinda neat. And really is helpful for stalkers I suppose
*sigh*
I remember when Altavista had really cool search strings, designed so people who knew boolean logic could use them. Then Compaq bought them and took it away. I remember when HotBot found exactly what I was looking for, then it died. Now Google? Geez. It would be nice for something to stay good, but business seems to break that which works well every time.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
TopClick is a search engine that uses Googles search technology, but their own servers. They are are basically a privacy portal that offers the speed and quality of Google without the influence of Yahoo to pollute your search results or harvest your browsing habits. If only every site I visited was that lean and informative.
Correct,but if other yahoo pages linked to these, and those pages weren't indexed, their rank would be lower. Remember that google looks at how many people link to a page when determining rank.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
You mean this? Follow the Advanced Search link on the left navbar from AV's homepage.
Or, if you prefer text mode, you can get something pretty close to Raging, but with Boolean operators and date ranges.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This sig intentionally left blank.
Take a look for yourself.
Bleh!
Offcourse this sort of thing is bound to happen with such an alliance.
:)
The thing to do then is offcourse to search multiple search engines simultaniously.
Which you do easiest at http://findfu.com
scary, but true... hasn't been a good day for these folks...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
That time was on purpose, just like this one... I'm not a chowderhead - I had Manwich for dinner, not chowder... err...
No Clevelan Steamers, thanks (I'll leave those to Marv Albert)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>yeah like that comment really deserves a 2..
>who's the moron that modded this up? come clean, shit for brains.
That would be me fogetting not to use the "No Score +1 Bonus" button. Think about it.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Try searching for creative apartment ethernet, you'll see nearly 3 pages of links to root pages (with a few non-root-pages sprinkled throughout).
Or search for epinions latex, it'll come up with epinion's root page, even though google's cached version of epinion's root page contains no occurances of the word "latex".
These are possible explanations:
- 1) Sites are paying google to get their home pages, and google changed their code.
Then again, if you search for basking robbins ice cream, it doesn't give you www.baskinrobbins.com anywhere, but rather gives you epinions.com/ as the third link. How the search engine came up with that, I'll never know.2) Google really really values root pages because most links are to root pages (pure speculation), so those get ranked first, and google's code sometimes ignore some of your search terms making an assumption that you messed up.
3) Similar to 2, the coders made an assumption that root pages are good, so they upped their scores artificially.
So yes, I think that google traded quality for profit.
--
Yes, I deliberately misspelled it. I was also testing my hypothesis that Google might throw out a search term if it thought it could find a much better site by doing so.
--
playstation capcom software monkey (15th)
snow cedars elegance snot (1st, only hit)
gumbo pot above frogs (5th)
gerber forks babies in the ass (1st)
You'll notice that even though google lists http://epinions.com/ as a hit in all these searches, you won't find all the searched words on their root page. Google's queries search for "all words", so I don't see how it could have come up with these hits, let alone how it would have ranked the root page that high.
--
I still think Google's the best though. And this could be my imagination, so if someone else has noticed this, please post a reply.
--
Good for searching for geek things, or good in general?
--
The shareholder is always right.
#include "subject:"
a company that indexes data should never out-right remove data from its index unless its incorrect. I mean making that MD directory dissapear to create more hits for yahoo is counter the aims of the google engine [to get you information].
Now, maybe its financially sound for them to do it since yahoo gives them money, but its a bad trend to start since the more people who are willing to pay (and I bet there's a bunch) the less your going to be able to get from each them in the end (for example its hard to push advertising prices up unless its a special event or something). I think such a financial outlook is short termed and potentially dammaging to their reputation, which is a terribly important factor for sites like these.
-Daniel
Except that Google's page ranking algorithm (based on links to and from other relevant pages) would be useless for ranking Usenet posts. There is no Usenet equivalent of the hyperlink, only threading and article references. For that sort of data, all you need is a very fast text search.
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
This isn't necessarily a conspiracy between Google and Yahoo, there is a possibility that so many people link to Yahoo that it skews the results that way.
I wonder if you read the same article I read. The one I read mentioned how the author had tested against very specific topics in the medical fields. Topics that people wouldn't link to Yahoo!, because Yahoo! doesn't really have much in the way of information about medicine. The chances that people are linking to Yahoo! on these topics is minimal, which is why the findings are so striking.
This may not necessarily show a conspiracy, but it does show that changes to Google's orignal algorithm have occurred, likely due to the new partnership between Yahoo! and Google. The article was simply pointing out that the relevancy of Google's results is not as high as it once was, due to this relationship.
The Inktomi-based Yahoo results can be found at HotBot, another Inktomi-based engine.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
However, I do know that if I'm making a search in Google, I don't care to find a list of links on Yahoo as a result (else I would have used Yahoo, don't you think?).
So, to get rid of Yahoo results, simply make your search at Google Advanced Search page (http://www.google.com/advanced_search.ht ml) and put "yahoo.com in the "exclude" field.
Et voilà! No more Yahoo pages showing up in google.
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
The article raises some serious questions that some of the slashdot audience may not be aware of. Just how fair are search engine results. If you consider how much power search engines wield over the content of the internet that gets read, you'll realize just how important it is that search engines take fairness seriously. If you can bribe search engines to not list sites, you effectively have censorship. This is something that needs to be verified. If it is happening, there might be a definite need for a non-profit search engine to keep the other search engines honest.
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
How will they make their money? This question was answered a few weeks ago here on /. The answer
One thing to remember about all this is that Google's results are also influenced by how many sites are linking to that particular website. If I were to do a search for my name on the internet, the results would first show www.fruvous.com's pages that had my name. The second would be pages at Photopoint.com. Third would be a newsgroup archive page that has a couple of my posts in it, and then my actual homepage. Why? Fruvous.com and PhotopPoint.com are far more popular to link to than www.rit.edu.
What it feels like is happening here is that the pertnership may have upped the score a little bit from sites that are lined from yahoo.com because there are more links directly from yahoo->google.
Of course, I could be wrong.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I read the article, and I'm familiar with the concept of how Google determins its rankings. It and www.directhit.com used fundementally different tactics then had previously been employed by the likes of Altavista, WebCrawler, and what have you. Google as I understand it uses a formula where a pages value is determined by the value of the pages linked to it. The pages linking to it's value is determined by the value of the pages that link to it tranferse X links in all directions. So for medical sites, not my forte, but any specialized subject will do, a repository of specialized knowledge which is linked to a lot of other repositories of specialized knowledge will have a high score on Google. Presumeably because each of the repositories will have had many people linking to them. Where as a lot of geocities homepages with a link to Yahoo.com will not have a high score as the individual geocities pages though great in number will not have a high scores themselves as they are not well linked to. Google does also take into account the usual stuff: meta tags, placement of keywords in the title, the body, how close together multiple keywords are etc. etc. All this goes into a "secret formula" which determines the pages ranking on a particular search. Combined with this secret formula which could well have been modified based on their recent agreement with Yahoo as suggested by this article, Google also has excellent spider technology. Now DirectHit relies on people in addition to the usual meta tags, number of occurences of the word, giving greater weight to having the word appear in the title, proximity of mulitple keywords to each other etc, in DirectHit the page that ranks the highest is the one the most people who've performed an identical search to you chose to click on. And example works best: If you perform a query on direct hit for I don't know "news for nerds" you get the benefit of everyone else who has ever performed a search on "news for nerds" if they all chose www.slashdot.org and due to the placement and occurences of "news for nerds" prominantly on the site itself slashdot could well be returned first for this querry. back to work... Muskie
(the other ones were from hotbot.com and altavista.com) Someone should spread the word about Google..
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Are you surprised? I'm not.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
In all fairness, I haven't noticed this to be the case (and I always use Google). In my experience, Google gives far and away the most useful replies to my queries, and I don't see any deal with Yahoo! changing this.
Yeah, about the time /. merges with the 'Weekly World News'. I see the headline 'END TIMES NEAR! STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN WEEPS HOT GRITS!'
Sigh. The David Letterman crowd wouldn't get it, but this is far funnier than anything on the list above. :)
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
News for Conspirators, Theories that matter.
/. crew is posting this paranoid drivel (GPL violations, Amazon paranoia, now this) to get pageviews up because half the people fall for that shit, and another hald (me included) can't believe this is what this site has sunk to. And I am helping. Of course this is because I do work for Andover.Net Inc, but that's another story.
WTF?? "not really enough statistics to prove anything" but still on the front page, with the ever-paranoid sounding rhetorical question? where is the Geek Compound? in Area 51?
You know, what? I got me a theory: the
Sarkazmo is the assumed identity of a long-time
I would like to see Google get into Usenet search business. I used Deja.com, but now it is a commercially bloated crap site.
With Google's extraordinary ability to sort pages, it would be an ideal move.
LinuxLover
Whenever we see results like this, we always should consider the source. Was the study done by an independent organization? Who funded the results? Was there some motive behind the study?
If you look, you will notice that the linked page is written by the people who aren't listed as high anymore. It seems fairly clear to me that they are merely bitching about not being listed as high on google, and I find it somewhat specious that google is telling their indexing software to rank Yahoo higher.
Futhermore, this could be the result of other changes designed to bring out more relevant results. For example, if they give linked-to pages a higher ability to assign relevancy (i.e. getting linked to by Yahoo gives your page a much better relevancy rating that getting linked to by my roommate) then obviously Yahoo's own pages (which are thouroughly linked by yahoo) will have a high relevancy.
There are two real possible ways to look at what happened here. Either Google put in special clauses in their code to bump up Yahoo's stats, or Yahoo adapted to the new technology to increase its scores in the search engine's data.
It would be quite simple for them to adjust their code in order to give Yahoo a leg up. All they would have to do is put in a simple if statement that would basically say "if(siteis(yahoo)) score++;" This isn't necessarily what happened, but it is quite possible.
On the other side, you must also remember that Yahoo basically is a site of lists. This is what they do, and they probably do it rather well since they've been doing it for so long -- I must admit that I don't use them all that often. When they looked at the Google data, they were probably able to update their lists to become more usefull, thus people started linking to them again, giving them more hits, they move up in the Google ratings... and this cycle continues ad infinitum.
Personally, i would say that the second case is probably the most likely one. Since they were looking for different search engine technology they were probably looking at Google and what it spat back, they then used that to stock up their lists to be better and then we have that funny little cycle I noted above. Overall, I would say there is absolutely nothing to worry about, Google isn't bumping up Yahoo's stats, Yahoo is looking at how Google works and is using the data to increase their sites value.
The article is saying, and seems to show some evidence, that since Yahoo partnered with Google that the way Google ranks things has silently changed.
Previously ranking was done based on how often a particular site was linked to, which is why google was so powerful compared to most other search engines. It was great for finding lists of pointers in specialized areas since good lists of links (i.e. a web gloss on a particular subject) would often be linked to.
Since then lists-of-links that were previously in the top 10 can't even be found in the first 500 links. Instead Yahoo comes up more often.
This isn't necessarily a conspiracy between Google and Yahoo, there is a possibility that so many people link to Yahoo that it skews the results that way. The other possibility is that the results are skewed due to the relationship between the two companies. That's what the article is about, not that Yahoo is using Google for a search engine.
For people who have actually read the article... it seems to me that what's going on here is that Google merged its database with Yahoo's, and naturally, everyone that uses Yahoo as a major resource will have links into Yahoo in their pages, and so Google's rankings have been shifted, not by 'conscious policy' but by a change in the contents of the database.
Yahoo's rise will stop when all the newly added directories have been fully spidered and statted and cross-ranked, and it'll probably fall as Google's database grows with non-Yahoo-database links being added.
Not that I have direct access to Google's database or algorithm, but, this seems more likely than a covert ranking-adjustment plan within Google.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Yes, it happens to me too: once a couple of months ago I was trying to find the official site for a particular type of ski, and like 80 hits out of 100 where to the fscking epinions pages.
;)
I was thinking as well about epinions poisoning google, but who knows. Anyways think about this, if they made their urls fairly random, *and* had a lot of pages, *and* every one of those pages had links to the main epinions page and the main page had some dynamic link that sent you back to the other page, this might influence google's rating of the page itself.
OTOH this line of reasoning might just be a byproduct of my overworked little mind
-- the cake is a lie
If David Letterman were to do a "Top 10 Geeks Signs Hell Is Freezing Over," he'd probably need only to look at the /. headlines.
/.!"
"OMG, Compaq may be violating GPL!!! Someone ask
"Run for the hills! Google is pimping Yahoo!"
"A private company decided not to publish DeCSS -- it's the end of free speech as we know it!"
"*Red Alert* Corporations try to make money *Red Alert*"
Once Yahoo links to Google:
Yahoo users significantly increase their use of Google, and submit URLs. These URLs will be Yahoo biased, because after all, these are Yahoo users. This bias changes Google's ratings, without any other intervention.
Hell, Google was probably good largely because it was popular with geeks. Like the Net at large, it will become diluted by pr0n surfers & greed. I hope Google and Yahoo both are looking at other methods of automatic category building, since there are lots of interesting approaches to that problem.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Herbie J.
No, no, you've got it all wrong. Though we are an alarmist crowd, the things you've described are business as usual.
The Top 10 Geek Signs Hell Was Freezing Over would go like this:
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
First of all Google does not rank SOLELY based on links to a page, they use a combination of the number of links to the page, the text on the page, its position, etc just like every other search engine. They also use the number of links from the page, and the text for 50 or so characters on either side of a link that links to the page. Its a wonderfully complex set of formulas that are being used to determine relevancy. While I have read the early papers on the methodology that Google is employing (from when it was a Academic project) it has obviously undergone a lot of improvements and refinements over time. They do not release the ranking criteria they are using to the general public (this is normal for Search Engine companies, who guard their criteria closely, and periodically change them without notice).
What seems most likely to me, is simply that Since Google has partnered with Yahoo, they have shared details on their ranking system or have assisted Yahoo staff in positioning the ranking of Yahoo pages in the Google database. As a result, the ranking position of Yahoo pages is on the rise simply because they have some inside information or help. That is why the pages have risen slowly over time, rather than simply popping to the top of the charts, as they might if Google had simply rewritten their formulas to make an exception when a Yahoo page is concerned.
With the work that has gone into creating Google, I do not think they would want to do any screwing around with their formulas that would result in major changes like people are suggesting here. They can help their partners rank better though.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
... back in my day, we didn't have any http search tools. I had to walk twelve miles, buck naked, in the snow to find a terminal with access to an archie client, and we didn't have no graphics neither! we had to read binary code to interpret our results, if we even got any over out 110 baud connection! and sometimes the results would be in swahili, and we didn't know what to make of what we downloaded, but we were happy! not whining snot nosed little brats like yourselves, who are mad because you can't find that naked picture of Britney Spears or haven't broken 88TB of mp3s downloaded, so stop sniveling!
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...