Yahoo! Vs. Google: Algorithm Standoff

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new report out from the guys who brought us the Google keyword density analysis. As they put it, "the goal of this analysis is to compare the keyword density elements of Yahoo's new algorithm with Google's algorithm." They compared 2000 low traffic, non-competitive keywords in the hopes of seeing the algorithms more clearly, without any possible search engine tweakings related to high-traffic keywords. Their findings are interesting. Should you go and rebuild your site based on these findings? Maybe not. It's worth a look though."

Comments

Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, aren't these the guys responsible for continually diluting the quality of search engine results? I'm getting really tired of sites that present one thing to search engines and something totally different to me.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

As always, there are is a grayscale of good and bad search engine optimization. A good webauthor designs a site for the users, but keeps the workings of search engines in mind, too.

Search engines need help with frames (if anyone can still find a good reason to use them). If you use Flash based navigation, you better make sure that you have a prominent document which links to all pages as well or search engines won't index them. It's also a good idea to use descriptive titles and put what's important at the top of the page. In other words, most good search engine optimization is exactly what you would do to make a site screen-reader or text-browser friendly.

Then there's link-bombing, show-something-different-to-Google, white-on-white text, redirections, etc.
It's quickly becoming so that you can't tell someone to optimize a site for inclusion in search indexes or they'll fall into the hands of this kind of scum. It's a little like the word "Hackers". Can't use that anymore without having to explain that you're not illegally breaking into other people's computers.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Bushcat]

If you use Flash based navigation

That's another set of people that need a whack with a clue stick.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends, for some types of sites it makes sense. I wouldn't oppose Flash navigation on a media-rich site, for example (but there absolutely has to be an alternative way of reaching every page).

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting really tired of sites that present one thing to search engines and something totally different to me.

Then complain about it. That practice is known as cloaking, and you can get sites blacklisted for it.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Araneas]

It's an escalating battle. Someone hijacks a keyword that is highly relevant to your site so you have to figure how to overcome that and give users something that isn't porn or a crappy search portal.

I think it's fair to say there are white hat SEOs as well as black hat hijack^H^H^H^H^H^H SEOs.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[dargaud]

That's what I wanted to submit to the Google programming contest, but it wasn't admittable:

• Make a 2nd robot that retrieves a few full web pages (with graphics) per site claiming to be IE6 (or a normal Mozila), thus lying about it being from google.
• Display the page in IE6 (or Mozilla), save the entire display as a bitmap image.
• Run the bitmap image through an OCR program to extract the real text seen by the user
• Compare this text with what the ordinary google robot sees.
• If the text is completely different, lover the ranking

This gets rid of all the blue on blue keywords, display:none keywords and others. I think it will come to that.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even better, just use an intelligent html parser that can work out if text would be hidden and ignore it if it is.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[AbbyNormal]

lover the ranking...
Wouldn't that get a bit messy? Personally, I would lower the ranking, but that's just my opinion. To each their own.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[SiggyRadiation]

Run the bitmap image through an OCR program to extract the real text seen by the user

Wouldn't it be smarter to just render both versions and compare bitmaps? No need to OCR then...

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[DrSkwid]

> Depends, for some types of sites it makes sense.

to keep away the non Windows users

go for it

use java menus while you're at it

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Pages tend to be quite dynamic these days, so if your comparison depends too much on the surroundings of the actual content, it may produce too many false positives. Take the Slashdot homepage for example: The ads vary in size and position. If a single line wraps differently due to that, an image comparison is bound to fail. On the other hand, OCR on rendered text should be extremely simple, considering you have full control over the fonts used and don't have to take any fuzziness into account.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Bushcat]

use java menus while you're at it

Wait, I've got another clue stick here somewhere.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

If a page is going to use Windows Media streaming, platform independence can probably be ruled out as a design goal. Not everyone has to cater to the whole world to find an audience. Besides, in which way does Flash exclude other operating systems?

Java Menus: Been there, done that. Wouldn't do it again, but it was better (more stable and easier to maintain) than DHTML at the time and there was a plain HTML fallback.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Hanji]

No.t ;

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[samhalliday]

thats ridiculous... OCR is not needed in this scenario, it is easy enough to write a program to find out what colour the background and foreground of text is, its probably just takes too much time to factor this in to the equation. your method would take _at least_ 10 seconds to even check a simple page (assuming all the code worked, which it wouldn't, cuz its OCR).

and, this way you are giving a lower ranking to pages which use text in images. it is not good practice to have all the text embedded in images, but it is often necessary for sytle purposes; an example being the logo of a site (ok, alt= should handle this). hell, i even do it! its cleaner than hoping the person on the other side can render the same fonts as me (which would be impossible cuz i filtered then thorugh GIMP to add some effects).

a lot of sites auto detect robots based on what you are saying, and either block them or launch a seek-and-destroy attack against you. to get around this, the file /robots.txt (which every large site should have) WILL be read by the google/yahoo prowler no matter what, and abided by. it plays the prominent role in what the search engines read... not the server reading the browser tag.

thats without even going into the algorithms of matching the read OCR text up against the text from the source.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

I find most "search engine optimization professionals" to be fulla shit. Let's face it; they have a vested interest in convincing you that they need to continuously (expensively) update your pages to make sure that you rank top 10.

Aw, bullshit! I have optimized pages now for 3 companies that I have worked for. They all consistently showed up in the first 10 hits (usually top 5) for specific search phrases that related to the business and I did it without using any of their damned "tricks" to do it! Not only that, once gained, the ranking stayed high without updating pages continuously.

Most of it is common sense and make clearly readable and focused web-pages anyway. This whole idea that there are magical "secrets" to getting high ranking on the search engines is misleading marketing manure.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[a24061]

Besides, in which way does Flash exclude other operating systems?

It excludes blind users with screen readers and people who don't or can't install superfluous plug-ins. Flash is great for entertainment but it should never be required for getting information.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Understood. I did write "media-rich site" though and DrSkwid had something to say about "non Windows users", so please stay focused. If you're a blind Flash hating epileptic on BeOS, you're not in the target demographic of "Webgames&Videos'R'Us".

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[scrytch]

> Search Engine Optimization Professional

Also known as "Spammers". Their entire purpose is gaming the system to promote crass commerce (and boy I do mean crass), and just to top it off, I haven't seen one that hasn't engaged in spam to promote their service (to be fair, I probably wouldn't see the ones that don't spam, since I'm not in the business of pushing sites up in some silly ratings criterion).

I never noticed the problem with google til just recently, just a few sites that seem to have my keyword no matter *how* obscure but are filled with nothing but links to ... other search engines, mostly paidclick ones of course. Those are fairly easy to strip out since the abstract is always nonsensical.

I'd love to see an option on the google toolbar of "report link as googlespam", but I can imagine the manpower that'd be required to sift through submissions (you can't just do it automatically).

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a very close relative to the halting problem if you're not going to render the site to interpret the output, and a real CPU-eater if you're going to render the site.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[anti-trojan]

Then a 1-pixel difference would spoil the whole idea. What about randomly changing quotes, pictures, and other dynamic data (like the date and time etc).

OCR'ing and checking for "totally" different content is a better approach (as in the parent post).

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[DavidStewartZink]

Nah, these guys are just scam artists. Google ranks pages by what pages link to them; these people seem unaware of this, andf aren't testing for it.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[SiggyRadiation]

What's the "difference" between a 1-pixel difference and a 1-character difference?

You don't need to drop a page's rank for just a 1-pixel (of a square) diff just as you don't need to drop a page's rank for a 1-char/sentence diff. Random quotes and time-related content are going to be a problem in both sollutions.

Whell, it was just a question. Got answered. Satisfied. :-)

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Woogiemonger]

A lot of times, text would be masked by making it a color that blends into the background graphic. A plain background color is intelligible by an HTML parser, but you would need to do at least some form of color histogram/pattern recognition on the background graphic to determine whether or not it is likely to mask keywords. Honestly, I think it's a nice idea, and it's not like every page has to be scanned. It's a way of filtering out a few relatively obvious bad apples, or at least some rather irritatingly hard to read web sites.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[0x0d0a]

I wouldn't oppose Flash navigation on a media-rich site

Umm. By definition, if a site is loaded with Flash, it's media-rich. :-)

I just can't really see Flash being a benefit. Folks thought that it was useful back when it was novel -- ("Look, the web page makes sounds when I click!"). We've gone through this same "novel" phones so many times on the web that it's depressing. When music came out, everyone had to put music on their personal pages, and at first it was kind of cute. Then it got really annoying. Even before that, there was GIF animation. I remember the first time that I saw GIF89a animation. I was enthralled. Here's a copy of this newish Netscape Navigator program and *stuff moves on the screen*. Surprise, a year later, with way too many sites using animated GIFs, I never wanted to see them again (and fortunately, my browser lets me disable their animation).

Flash is the same thing. It only interests anyone because it's novel. There just aren't any good justifications for using it.

Actually, no. I believe I've used effectively once before. There was a new MP3 player of some sort out, and you could use an embedded Flash file to try out the interface and see what you liked. That was actually a useful thing.

Aside from that, Flash on webpages is useless.

Flash still has some merit for standalone video, as there are no other good vector animation formats (SVG is just plain not designed for animation).

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Search Engine Optimization Professional?

OMG we are all fscked, playing video games for a phd has more merit than these guys. This is as disturbing as "communication experts" (if you speak you are a communications expert). How do these guys justify getting a paycheck for being lazy assed slackers? At least comm professionals have the fact that most people cant communicate.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[ichimunki]

Yes, but it seems to me that like another escalating battle there will be a simple agent-based, learning algorithm solution.

Bayesian filters learn to recognize spam and are personalized to the user. They are at least as effective as rules-based mail filters, but very effectively halt the rules race (where the filter writer writes a rule to filter by, and the spammer figures out a way around the rule, rinse, repeat).

We need something like that for web pages and web searching. It's not just about keywords with sites like Google. It's also about the other parts of their page rank scheme. But imagine that your spider software (unlike Google) was grading its results. For any bad result it could go back and score against every page involved in getting to that result. Same for good results. Next time you search it gives more emphasis to pages in good result trees. Etc.

I mean, that's not an actual technical idea there (I can think of lots of problems with that sort of spider/agent idea that would keep it from being practical). But that's the kind of thinking we need to be doing. Is there a way to solve this problem of finding information that won't involve a central repository of keyword scores and rankings?

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[AndroidonPPC]

True. A good place to start is just to check bgcolor against text and at least make sure that is ok. once you have a value for text, convert any bgimage into greyscale and find the average grey value in 4x4, 8x8, and/or XxY neighborhoods or do a histogram. basically, just make sure the text contrasts enough with the image.

Doing a full screen cap would work, but screen cap and OCR would majorly bog down on a processor especially when working with huge arrays (the bitmaps would have to be huge in some cases), and might no be efficient enough to be worthwhile.

of course, contrast checking might be as well.
So, what exactly do all the numbers mean? Does anybody else think that this study might have been the result of dead monkey logic?
Andy

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[spentrent]

FOOLS! Flash is a GREAT MARKETING TOOL. OF COURSE you won't use Flash on a site about liver diseases in 16th century Europe...

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash sucks. You can't search for text in it, it takes a long time to load all those silly graphics, clicking on things usually results in waiting through a whiz bang animation (just take me to the information, dammit!), it can't be translated by Babelfish, webpages are meant to be seen not heard, and well the list goes on..

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing tool it is, and exactly how many end users care about advertising? None.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[amplt1337]

and, this way you are giving a lower ranking to pages which use text in images.

If all your text is in images, then you're already not going to rank very highly in Google -- they're not going to OCR your text, they're going to see you as content-free. (Which you most likely are, if you can't be read comfortably in Lynx -- the message is still more important than the medium -- but that's a side issue/flamebait). It's the same problem for folks who are using database-driven sites to serve up lots of content manageably (a most excellent idea); if the dumb spider can't figure out how to read it, they're not getting ranked.

I'm even going to go out on a limb here and say that the company that can handle database-driven sites best will wind up having a serious advantage in the Search Engine Wars... that company will be best able to index content from well-managed periodical sites, as well as handling commercial sites better (and maybe even putting them in a separate category).

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Hentai]

Now THERE'S an interesting idea - a Google subscription service. I know I'd pay Google $20/mo to dedicate a few megs to customized Bayesian filters that learn MY particular search needs, and remember them for next time. It'd depend on their privacy policy, though.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[thbb]

Here is where to file a complaint at google. Fast and easy to do, don't hesitate...

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Lozzer]

This is the only good use of Flash I've seen. My nephew likes it, anyway.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[tanguyr]

Ah c'mon you're all being just a tad harsh. Sure, gratituous flash usage sucks but flash can do some pretty nifty things: you can build simple web based video conferencing or shared whiteboard apps in flash quickly and easily, and there are some nice games out there as well. Don't think of it as the heavier and even more annoying replacement for animated gifs, think of it as an alternative gui technology - "not-so-thin client".

As pcs get faster and faster and more and more people get broadband, you will see more and more flash being used - but maybe not used well. One of the problems today is that web designers still think in html, so they do something that looks like moving html at 10 - 20 times the weight and 1/100th the reaction time. /t

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Chris_Jefferson]

The latest version of flash has support for designing sites suitable for both the blind people.

True, it blocks people who don't install the plugin, but by that argument perhaps all sites should be compatable with me just telneting in case I don't want to install a web browser at all?

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[JimDabell]

Or even better, just use an intelligent html parser that can work out if text would be hidden and ignore it if it is.

There are legitimate reasons for hiding text. For example, putting help text into a page, and only showing it when the user clicks a help button (far more friendly than popups).

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[samhalliday]

If all your text is in images, then you're already not going to rank very highly in Google

yeah, you're correct. but there is the alt= flag which displays the alternative object should the main one not be displayable; thats what i use for all my text which is in an image... i duplicate it in alt= for lynx users to read [and help w3c validator happy :-)]

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Talinom]

The absolute best search results I ever got were from a program called "Bullseye". I believe Infoseek had a link to it for a while.

This program would go to about 30 different search engines, throw your query at them, return the results, go to each page listed, and search the contents of that actual page to see if what you were looking for was really there.

There was the option to search just the web, newsgroups, forums, onlines stores, and so on. Most of the methods for submitting the query to the search engines, as well as the returned results, have changed for most search engines so it doesn't work anymore. Plus many of the search engines are long gone so the results were getting more limited as time went on.

Has anyone developed another tool that does this? Were I a coder I would find the time to make this myself and distribute it under the GPL. Sadly my coding consists of making my computer say "Hello, World".

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Web sites ARE compatible with you just telneting in.

---
telnet slashdot.org 80
GET / HTTP/1.0
HOST: slashdot.org

---

At this point you will get the web page at http://slashdot.org/

Remember: 2 newlines at the end.

Any other stupid comparisons you wish to make?

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[DrSkwid]

Besides, in which way does Flash exclude other operating systems?

Let's see

Mozilla on FreeBSD (that's me) :

We are unable to locate a single Web player that best matches your platform and operating system

Mothra on plan9 (also me)

We are unable to locate a single Web player that best matches your platform and operating system

The acceptable list is :

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP - Internet Explorer/AOL/Netscape/Mozilla/Opera/CompuServe - Flash 7

Mac OSX / OS9 - Internet Explorer/Safari/Netscape/Mozilla/Opera - Flash 7

Other Operating Systems
Linux x86 Flash Player 6 for Mozilla 1.1 - (Not officially supported by Macromedia.)
Pocket PC Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC 2003 (color devices supported only)
OS/2 Flash Player 4 for Netscape
Sun Solaris (Sparc/Intel) Flash Player 6 for Netscape
HP-UX Flash Player 6 for Netscape
SGI IRIX Flash Player 4 for Netscape

On my 500,000 page impression web site, using Flash would have excluded the otherwise successful visitors running the following OS

CPM
Windows 3.xx
WebTV
OSF Unix
Aix
NetBSD

I will admit that the actual numbers are low but being excluded/ignored is how us non Windows users are treated day in day out. Seems you can't fight the pigopolists.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

True dat. God, that reminds me of my last boss. She was the worst of the dot-bomb snake-oil salespeople (and I do mean salespeople, as she knew not one technical lick of what she spoke!) I knew she was trouble when she came on board and started using-- with a straight face-- terms like "repurposing," "thinking outside the box," "value-added experience," etc. As the Simpsons put it, "Paradigm? Proactive? Aren't those just words that stupid people use to sound important?" But, I guess that's why she and her husband had to declare bankruptcy on their dotcom scum business. Ha ha.

Everything in her life was apparently a scam, though, as she constantly bragged about writing off every room in her house on her taxes... hope she enjoys her audit!

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[mlilback]

Flash excludes using that site from my Treo. Pretty lame when I go to someones website for an address/phone number and am unable to get it on my mobile browser (pda, phone, etc). Same goes for restaurant menus, hours of operation, etc.

Too many sites today just contain a big flash file.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[drpentode]

Just because a site is media rich doesn't mean it's using Flash. Media rich means that there's audio and video as well as text, and you don't need Flash for audio or video. These can be done elegantly with HTML and embedded MPEG, AVI or WM* objects.

Also, Flash greatly enhances the user experience, especially in online learning situations where animations are required or on sites where navigation goes beyond the standard HTML hierarchy. Sure, some people may be excluded, but those are the extreme minority.

Flash content is great for the disabled because it can screen read for them, or the interface can be tweaked. Color contrast can be adjusted, font size can be adjusted, etc., without having to rely on flaky CSS support from browsers and bad programmers.

It's all a matter of using the right tool for the right job. Overusing Flash sucks, but so does not using it when it's needed.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[cpeterso]

man, that is some trippy shit!! :)

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[dcam]

Add Javascript into the mix and this gets pretty difficult. I write some pages that only display stuff as the result of an onload event for the page. For example it is often more efficient to load up a javascript array with values and use that to populate a drop down list, as it can avoid roud trips to the server to regenerate the ddlist.

There are also pages that only display stuff when you click on something. The MSDN pages commonly do this, often for things like code samples. They display a basic page with the option to show more information under relevant sections.

I've also written a page that is generated almost entirely by javascript, basically because you can regenerate the page in response to certain actions on the client without having to make a round trip to the server each time.

How intelligent are you going to make this parser again?

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[dcam]

What about a background image? You'd need to somehow work out where the text is going render to relative to the background.

OCR isn't such a bad idea, except for the reasons onlined in my earlier comment about Javascript.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[iantri]

They ARE. One can easily read the HTML source code and make a fair bit of sense of the page.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Boltronics]

It's no wonder they don't support Flash on GNU/Linux systems - it's buggy as hell! I was a beta tester for Macromedia's GNU/Linux player (offered the opportunity after reporting so many bugs in FlashMX). Needless to say, many bugs never got fixed. My browser (FireFox) often crashes - and it's almost always due to a Flash-'enhanced' or Java-'enhanced' site. They should just enhance gplflash instead of making their own version, but they don't want to release the Flash specifications of new versions for quite some time after it's release (to give them an advantage over the competition).

Of course by that stage, most of the motive to develop a free software player is lost by the community anyway.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[mapinguari]

Sure, but the search engine shouldn't be taking into account help text that most users won't actually see when viewing the page.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[JimDabell]

The help text was just an example. What about the technique that presents a single page as a series of tabs, or the related technique of presenting a long form as a series of pages? Search engines should certainly take that text into consideration.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

> ... for both the blind people.

If there is only 2 of them, why bother?

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[yaar]

And for the small lot of us running Linux or BSD on an "exotic" architecture, Flash isn't an option. (To my knowledge, Flash is only available as a binary, and I don't know of any free alternatives.)

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[0x0d0a]

Just because a site is media rich doesn't mean it's using Flash.

That's not what I claimed -- it's the converse of what I said.

The original poster wrote that using Flash on media-rich sites is justified. I followed up that using Flash *makes* a site media-rich. You said that not all media-rich sites use Flash, which while true, is only a counterargument to the converse of what I said.

Also, Flash greatly enhances the user experience, especially in online learning situations where animations are required or on sites where navigation goes beyond the standard HTML hierarchy.

I can't think of a situation where online learning would require Flash because it's online learning.

Flash content is great for the disabled because it can screen read for them,

The same can be read for non-Flash, with the added benefit that a disabled person can set their browser up to do so for *all* sites, as opposed to the one where the webmaster implemented speaking functionality.

Color contrast can be adjusted, font size can be adjusted, etc

Both can be done without Flash -- I enlarge my own browser font so that I can sit well back from the monitor. Heck, the lightweight browser I use is dillo, which *definitely* doesn't have any CSS support, and certainly supports increasing font size.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Not the latest Flash. Flash is now compatible with Microsoft Active Accessibility, which means that screen readers can read and activate buttons and other objects in Flash applications. Tab navigation also now works.

Try it. Start up Microsoft Narrator (Windows Key + U on Windows 2000/XP) and head to macromedia.com.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[forlornhope]

I have to agree that Flash used poorly is a horrible thing. But Flash does have its uses.

Who can argue with Strong Bad.

Seriously though, Flash, like many other tools, can always be used poorly. Its up to the web designer to use the tools properly and if you encounter a site that uses any tool in a way that you dont like, dont just degrade a tool for someone else's mistake, degrade that person or orginization for being braindead.

Note: For those people not using one of macromedia's supported operating system, there is an open source plugin that Im currently using to view all flash and I have seen only a few instances where it does not work.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note the quoted term "totally"...

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[mabinogi]

hah, do you really believe the CPM user is real?
They've got to be masking their user agent.

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[SlashSim]

I'd love to see an option on the google toolbar of "report link as googlespam", but I can imagine the manpower that'd be required to sift through submissions (you can't just do it automatically).

That's a great idea. I recall hearing about a NASA project using volunteers on the internet to classify craters on Mars from images. To combat innacurate submissions they had many different people classify the same image and filtered out the spurious results.

For Google, a statisticaly meaningful number of "googlespam" hits for a page could reduce its pagerank. Use the parallel processing power of millions of human brains to defeat spammers. Some form of abuse prevention would be nessecary, of course, but Google already has a cookie on my machine and many talented software engineers.

I would cheerfully offer a half second of my lifetime to demote scumbag spammers in google's ranking. In fact, I expect it would elicit a gleeful cackle from me as I hit the button.

Take THAT evil spammer scumbag!

Re:Search Engine Optimization Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to my client, he just won't drop the flash idea. I tell him, "Look Bob, Flash doesn't work for a Diseases From The Middle Ages to Modern Day portal site" but he doesn't listen.

Uhhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get what the results of this test were. Did Google have better handling of the density, or did Yahoo? Is bigger better or does smaller win out?

Re:Uhhh...

[ran-o-matic]

The test wasn't meant to determine which search produced better results. The results of the test help you determine what to put on a web page to get a higher rank on Google or Yahoo. Its really just trying to scam the search engines.

Re:Yahoo?

[Bigman]

From the article:

Following months of testing their search engine results, Yahoo has now launched their search algorithm and replaced the Google results they had been using.

So you are way out of touch, I'm afraid :o)

Re:Yahoo?

[Pharmboy]

Nope, the big changover was a few days ago. Even had a story here on it. Inktomi now provides the smarts for the yahoo search, and MSN and Lycos as well.

If Yahoo wants my vote...

[PoprocksCk]

...they'll have to get rid of all that junk on their home page. Much of the reason for my using Google is that its home page is simple, it loads quickly, and it is just so easy to _search_, which is what a search engine should be. Yahoo failed when it became a "portal" and tried to do too much by itself. If they could somehow reduce the size of Yahoo's page down to that of Google (that would mean getting rid of those ads, guys) then maybe I'd consider trying it.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[penultimatepost]

That's why They have: http://Search.yahoo.com

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[ravishjunk]

Actually you can directly go here, http://search.yahoo.com which is more or less clean.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[PoprocksCk]

Heh...

Well that's all well and good, but how many people would know to type that in?

Has anyone looked at altavista lately? They've certainly taken the Google route, and their home page looks a lot like Google now, as does search.yahoo.com. However, in search.yahoo.com _and_ altavista, I noticed that "sponsored results" show up before the real ones, but they appear in the list just the same. That could confuse newbies, and I prefer the approach Google has taken to advertising (shoving the ads to a separate entity on the right, and keeping them text-based).

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[ak3ldama]

I know many people who use Yahoo! as a home page and they like the many services that are offered by Yahoo! besides just the search facilities. If all they wanted was search I doubt they would use yahoo.com for their homepage.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[Pedrito]

"Yahoo failed when it became a "portal"..."

It failed? If a market cap of 28 BILLION dollars is failure, what do I have to do wrong to get there?

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[PoprocksCk]

Well, I meant that it failed as a search engine... if you go back to the year 1995 or so, Yahoo was _the_ search engine, and then around 1997 it became Altavista, and now it's Google. Yahoo has not failed as a portal -- they've got one of the best portals out there. But when they became a portal, they became less and less of a search engine in my opinion.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[Sique]

Yahoo never was a search engine in the pure sense of word. Yahoo started out as a browsable catalogue of the Web, where every entry was put into categories by hand. The automated search came later and was bought as service from external providers up until now.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[whatever74]

They got too get rid off that "SPONSOR RESULTS" which make me scrolled a min before I can see my search results. Those sponsor result are way to intrusive! So far.... Google 1 Yahoo 0

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried raging.altavista.com yet? That's been there since before I knew Google (and that's been quite a while ofcourse).

Used to be on ragingbull.com, dunno if it still is.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[anti-trojan]

Correct. First they used Altavista, then Google, and now Inktomi.

Maybe they should dump the catalogue (is it still profitable?) and switch to Open Directory as well...

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[anti-trojan]

However, in search.yahoo.com _and_ altavista, I noticed that "sponsored results" show up before the real ones, but they appear in the list just the same. That could confuse newbies, and I prefer the approach Google has taken to advertising (shoving the ads to a separate entity on the right, and keeping them text-based).

You can buy similar adspace from Google too. Check out this for example.

But at least they change the background color of the ads and put a "Sponsored Link" notice.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[polymorpheus]

how is search.yahoo.com more cluttered than google.com?

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[demonbug]

I've been using Yahoo for years as my homepage, it was quick and easy to set up nice news summaries and stock market summaries on things I was interested in. Their search feature always sucked, though, so I have used Google for that purpose. Unless Yahoo Search comes up with much better results than Google, I see no reason to change this. It isn't all that hard to type in "google.com" when I want to search for something.

Re:If Yahoo wants my vote...

[Shadarr]

Me too. I use Yahoo for pretty much everything except searching.

And a User Friendly game to go along!

[Indras]

Just grab a friend and a deck of cards, and you can play Yahoo vs. Google at home.

Re:And a User Friendly game to go along!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris Langreiter has a cute toy to compare Yahoo vs. Google results.
Touch the dots !

It's written in REBOL

Re:And a User Friendly game to go along!

[Psychic Burrito]

Very cool toy, thanks!

What I already found out with this tool: For movie queries, I always feel that the imdb is a very good resource. Google always neglected the imdb a bit, but now Yahoo is much better.

Re:And a User Friendly game to go along!

[Destoo]

and of course, a quick peek at imdb.com/robots.txt could explain why...

# robots.txt for http://imdb.com/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: /ActorSearch
Disallow: /ActressSearch
Disallow: /AddRecommendation ...

It also includes "User-agent: *" about halfway through, but the list was different at some time..

You can always check the previous versions of the robots.txt on the wayback machine

Re:And a User Friendly game to go along!

[Psychic Burrito]

Well...

• the important URLs /title and /name are not on the exclude list for Google in the robots.txt
• To inhibit google from going through your page, you would need to address it by its name, which is "googlebot". This "Mediapartners-Google" is something different
• The important point is that imdb links still appear in Google, but often not among the first 5 hits. So this entirely up to Google's and its ranking algorithm.

So, I don't think this will explain why Google values imdb links as low as it does.

Re:And a User Friendly game to go along!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look what turned up as #8 on yahoo and #6 on google's search for slashdot.

I think

[Bishop, Martin]

Google is way too embedded in everyones everyday life, it will just naturally be more widely used. When was the last time you heard someone say "Yahoo it"?

Re:I think

[rosie_bhjp]

This is true but when you make a Xerox of something you are more likely to be using a copier made by Konica, Ricoh, Sharp, etc. Brand name awareness doesn't necessarily mean dominance. That is exactly the attitude that brought Xerox down in the 70's/80's.

Re:Yahoo?

[sam1am]

Yahoo! Switches Search Engines (Wednesday February 18, @09:51AM) has the info on when this happened.

Google Super Computer?

[YanceyAI]

Wasn't there a Slashdot article claiming that the Google servers may be the fastest super computer in the world, but they are so busy they couldn't run the benchmark? I can't find it now. If that's the case, how does Yahoo compete? By dividing the traffic? Can anyone link me?

Re:Google Super Computer?

[PoprocksCk]

Well, I know that Google runs on what is, I believe, the world's largest Linux cluster.

For those of you who don't know, a cluster is (as far as my understanding takes me) when you take several ordinary computers and link them together, providing a cheaper way to get a "fake" supercomputer.

Re:Google Super Computer?

[/ASCII]

Your statement is not completely correct. There is nothing "fake" about a cluster based supercomputer. In fact, all sufficiently large supercomputers are cluster based. Many of them use special purpose, low latency NICS and switches, and proprietary communication protocols, but the underlying principle of a Beowulf cluster is the same as that of the Earth simulator.

Re:Google Super Computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linking ordinary computers does not produce a supercomputer. This was discussed in response to a recent Slashdot article about an attempt to get an ad-hoc Linux cluster into the Top-500 supercomputer list. The most you can realistically hope for is a system which can handle many independent tasks, somewhere between what grid computing can provide and what you need real supercomputers for. The scale from Grid computing through cheap clusters to supercomputers is mostly a scale of network latency and throughput. It could therefore be argued that the Google cluster may have the aggregated power of a supercomputer, but is not capable of efficiently working on supercomputer-typical problems.

Re:Yahoo?

[MoriarGryphon]

RTFM, Yahoo is switching to their own engine.

Personally, I find the differences in how the two engines handle bold text to be most interesting. If only for that, I'd stick to Google.

Most pages that have 17 occurences of your search text in bold are only going to be Porn sites ((unrelated to your search)) or Spam sites ((unrelated to your search)).

A layman's view

[EulerX07]

Yesyer I was hearing a colleague curse at his computer yesterday because he was looking for something specific.

"Man, Goggle SUCKS now!, I'll try yahoo."

"DAMN! Yahoo sucks even more!"

I have to admit that I used to think google was incredible just after it came out, but nowadays I'm used to wading through 10-15 pages of results before finding something relevant to what I need.

Re:A layman's view

[Quaryon]

Is anyone else getting so annoyed by pages which grab your keyword and then direct you to Amazon, no matter what the topic? Seems that every time I do a search on Google and find a site which looks interesting they're either just ripping Amazon's content or redirecting me there.

Guys, if I wanted to go to Amazon I would just type "www.amazon.co.uk" into my browser.. If I'm searching on Google it's because I've either already looked at Amazon and didn't find what I want, or because Amazon is really not relevant..

I've started adding "-amazon -kelkoo -dooyoo -pricewatch" and others to my Google searches recently which helps cut down the chaff a little, but doesn't seem to cut out all the Amazon ripoffs.

Q.

Re:A layman's view

[Anonymous Coward]

>>
I have to admit that I used to think google was incredible just after it came out, but nowadays I'm used to wading through 10-15 pages of results before finding something relevant to what I need.

Yep. I agree. I search for something as simple as "Philips DVD driver" for a Philips DVDRom drive and I get at least five adds selling Philips CD/DVDRom drives before I find a "SINGLE" reference to Philips themselves. Is this what Google has become? Maybe I should have put an 's' on driver.

Codifex Maximus

Re:A layman's view

[dubiousmike]

Do you know how often I hear someone say they cant find something on Google?

Then I walk over and find it within 2 minutes.

People still don't really know how to use search engines. They don't use enough keywords or the right ones.

I wont use Yahoo for Search. I think they are hella shady with their privacy policies (they switched my preferences when "aquiring" new services from 3rd parties which I was a member of).

Their games and fantasy sports stuff is fun though. Its all about the value they give me when it comes to my privacy.

I trust Google, so they get my search querries.

Re:A layman's view

[pledibus]

I think google's ranking system needs a major overhaul; various sleazy companies have become *much* too effective at fooling it. For example, below are the first three hits that I got by typing "prozac suicide" into google (I've deleted the URLs to protect the guilty :-). Most of the top 20 hits are similar to these.

prozac suicide
Prozac prozac suicide. prozac nation nude Viagra prozac hair loss Paxil
prozac dogs Yasmin ssri prozac Propecia prozac ocd. ... prozac suicide. ...

Prozac Suicide - Shopping and Discounts - PROZAC SUICIDE
Prozac Suicide Prozac Suicide. Are you looking for Prozac Suicide? We've searched
the internet for the best Prozac Suicide and we hope you enjoy what you find! ...

Prozac Suicide
Real Pharm - Lowest Prices & Fantastic Service - Prozac Suicide, ... Prozac
Suicide Prozac Suicide. Prozac(R) is a selective serotonin ...

Re:A layman's view

[a24061]

I wont use Yahoo for Search. I think they are hella shady with their privacy policies

What about Google's perpetual data retention and refusal to say what they may or may not do with the info?

Re:A layman's view

[Dalroth]

Try -search as well. You're already at Google (which is a search engine), so you don't need to see links to other search engine sites. That should help cut out even more of the cruft.

Bryan

Re:A layman's view

[evilmatt]

And yet, weirdly enough, if you click on the second result to that query, you wind up on a page of low fat Mexican food recipes.

Wonder what they're trying to tell us here?

Re:A layman's view

[jafuser]

Every time I hit one of these para-sites I reach up to my trusty old Google toolbar and click the blue sad face. I encourage others to do the same.

Re:A layman's view

[an_mo]

Even more annoying: typing the exact title of a book on Amazon's search box, and getting a list of 5 or 6 different books, then a sponsored link to the exact book sold by a different bookstore. Then typing the exact title on the advanced search option of amazon, wading through the results to find that amazon sells it at the same price.
Try to search for "my art my life" using "all products"

Re:A layman's view

[Anonymous Coward]

I've started adding "-amazon -kelkoo -dooyoo -pricewatch" and others to my Google searches recently which helps cut down the chaff a little, but doesn't seem to cut out all the Amazon ripoffs.

That's a nice idea. An even nicer idea would be if someone would make a frontend for google that automatically inserts a bunch of those to your searches to reduce irrelevant content. I'm thinking something like a few checkboxes
Remove search results from
[ ] Shops (Amazon...)
[ ] Blogs
etc.

Re:A layman's view

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't have the google toolbar, what does hitting the blue sad face do?

Re:A layman's view

[rofthorax]

Not many people search for this stuff, that's why you get these pages.. If you did the searches and spent some time on the pages (make sure you have a google toolbar) then the favorable results would appear at the top of the pages, but you would have to have more people doing this.. Doing these unlikely searches just points out that you have very uncommon tastes in search terms and there isn't very many people out there looking for what you are interested in.. Also you could use this, as if you were selling something, to determine what people were interested in.. I wonder if Google sells their search statistics to marketing comitees..

Re:A layman's view

[barthrh2]

That's why I've moved to Vivisimo: - meta search that hits all the best engines (customizable) - Really basic front page (Google-esque) and a good advanced page - Clusters results in to categories so you can easily filter the relevant stuff out. - Lots of other nifty tools, like page preview right from the search results page. Dogpile also uses Vivisimo's technology, but overall I find Vivisimo more usable (better tree, fewer graphics). Because I get my Google results through Vivisimo (it searches Netscape, which uses Google), I never use traditional engines except for comparison purposes, category browsin and, of course, Google Groups.

Re:A layman's view

[ran-o-matic]

Unless things have changed, the blue sad face does nothing. The voting buttons were being tested as a way to provide feedback to Google. The sad face would tell Google the result was bad. It should be cool when they get it working.

Re:A layman's view

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I've moved to Vivisimo: - meta search that hits all the best engines (customizable) - Really basic front page (Google-esque) and a good advanced page - Clusters results in to categories so you can easily filter the relevant stuff out. - Lots of other nifty tools, like page preview right from the search results page.

So, remember Vivisimo, folks, for all your searching needs. That's Vivisimo.

The preceeding message was paid for by Vivisimo.

Re:A layman's view

[base_chakra]

Every time I hit one of these para-sites I reach up to my trusty old Google toolbar and click the blue sad face. I encourage others to do the same.

Of course you realize you're also simultaneously encouraging people to use IE on Windows, because (sadly) that's all the Toolbar runs on. :p

Re:A layman's view

[slightly_kooky]

I was onsite at a customers today, and they had some virus or something.

Whatever they searched for on google, they got loads of popups (including amazon). Left right and centre.

Pain in the arse, but that is how the non techies see the web - until I cleaned their machine out.

Tim

Re:A layman's view

[W2k]

That's not true. Next time, you ought to check your facts before posting. I suggest using Google . :)

Moz/Fb/Ffox users, the download link is here.

Re:A layman's view

[base_chakra]

Kettle, check your blackness. The unofficial GoogleBar doesn't emulate the features (e.g., 'sad face') the poster described.

Pattern Recognition

[Space cowboy]

This is essentially a problem in pattern recognition, and it's a damn hard problem to solve because of the disparity between the high-volume and low-volume words.

Information is essentially the inverse of entropy. Entropy can be calculated, and you can use Bayes probability theory to get a hold on the information content of a given word within a set of words.

What is difficult to do, and what search engines are trying to do, is measure the mutual information inherent between the set of pages that the word appears in, and the word itself, then apply that to all the words in the searched-for phrase; this is commonly called 'context'. This is plainly impossible to do for every given phrase, for every word combination, for every page indexed. The best you can do is use a statistical approach (and Bayes is your friend again) to come up with "good" matches.

The problem with the statistical approach is the class unbiasing, since once you have wildly different statistical populations, your choice of context gets harder and harder - the "easy" standard models don't cope very well. You don't have the computational resources to do a good analysis, so you're essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place.

This is why the google idea of strengthening the importance of a word depending on linked pages was such a good one - it "did" the hard work by relying on the entire planet to do it for them, by creating links. Of course, what one man can do, another can undo, and Google has got progressively worse over time. It's still by-far the best though, and my search engine of choice. When you look at the queries from search-sites, I get 100x as many from Google as Yahoo (next nearest)....

People think searching is easy, and it is. What's really really hard is searching *well*.

Simon

Re:Pattern Recognition

[Eivind]

And what is even harder, as you sorta hint at, is searching well in a world where thousands of people do their damnedest best to game the system.

Google doesn't only have to make sense of a great big mess.

It has to make sense of a great big mess where a significant part of the pages are made *spesifically* to confuse Google, and where a part of those same pages gets tuned regularily in dedicated attempts at confusing whichever algorithm google use more.

Most of the cases where Google returns poor results these days, it's obvious to a human observer that the bad results on top are *purposely* made to confuse Google. I've even seen pages that return one set of content if your user-agent is "Googlebot", and another, totally different content (dialer, etc) if your user-agent is anything else.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[fermion]

The other problem with a statistical approach the general assumption the the data is largely unbiased. The problem with search engines is that they assume that information gathered from a self selected unmonitored population is valid. In the pre-google days this meant that we assumed that individual keywords were meaningful. Now we assume that links are meaningful. Neither of these are strictly true as we have intelligent agents with the mean and motivation to lie.

Statistically we should have some information gathering and analysis targeted towards assessing the validity of the information. Are the links themselves information or entropy? This is what google is working on. I think we are going to need some human processing, which is the link at the bottom of the pages asking if the results are useful.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[ericspinder]

I've even seen pages that return one set of content if your user-agent is "Googlebot", and another, totally different content (dialer, etc) if your user-agent is anything else.

This is probally Google's biggest problem. What they need to do is make a second pass at specific pages in a site which has recently been crawled with a more typical USER-AGENT to see if there is significant differences. They whould have to hit every page. The second crawler could also check to see what is "visiable" to the user. When sites fail the second crawler, lower (or eliminate) their ranking. If the Secondary crawler has enough problems with a domain they can lower all of the rankings on it. If they have enough problems with an IP address (say over 35% of know domains)they can do the same for that address, ditto for subnets.

Basicly use automated "scammer checks" to see if a particular area of the web is less "reputable" and then rank that area (directory, domain, IP address, subnet, netblock) lower. These scammer checks may change based on the flavor of the month.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[ericspinder]

Sorry for replying to myself, but there is a significant error...

The second crawler would not have to hit every page.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[fupeg]

This why good search engines from Yahoo and (hopefully) MSN are important. Google has a Microsoft like stranglehold on searches. So if you want to fool people, you only have to figure out Google. It's a search monoculture, and as such it will be exploited just like an open port on Windows. If there are competing search engines using significantly different algorithms, then it's a lot more difficult to spoof all these engine and search results on all three, including Google, will improve.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[Eivind]

That would indeed help. Scammer-checks would have to come from random and not known-to-be-google ip-adresses too, to be useful. For obvious reasons I haven't observed this first-hand, but it would surprise me a lot if there aren't similar sites which return one page if your ip-adress is Google, and a completely different page if your ip-adress is anything else.

It's like the difference between engineering and security. Engineering requires that you program murphys computer. (if anything can go wrong - it will.) It requires that you take into account all situations the program will reasonably meet in its lifetime. It is very hard to do well.

Security requires, however, that you take into account not only things that can "go wrong", but even things that go wrong on purpose. That you deal with a world in which you don't only have "bad luck", but rather a world in which someone is doing their damnedest to force you into this particular bad luck.

From an engineering-standpoint, a program that has a race condition if run on february 29th, on a day with full-moon, with the PID 37912, with a certain input that'll never occur in normal data, will probably never expose that race-condition, much less will it be a problem. (it'll still be bad engineering, but it'll probably be without consequences)

In a security-context, however, the fault could be (depending on cicumstances) disastrous. People will spend considerable effort convincing your program that it's february 29th and that the moon is full, they'll feed it only the single bad input, thousands of times over if nessecary,they'll run "echo" to wrap-around the pid so that you'll always have the one single bad pid and they'll have a hundred threads in the background doing their damnedest to take advantage of the race-condition and create that file in that split-second when it must not be created.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[psycho]

Information the inverse of entropy? More entropy means less information?
Way to go, Shannon.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[Space cowboy]

Two things here:

1) You're invoking Shannon, whose work provides a law limiting the amount of information that can be sent down a channel with a given capacity. I never mentioned capacity - I said two things were the inverse of each other, and they essentially are. Shannon's work obviously still applies, if limits are placed on capacity.

2) Information is indeed the inverse of entropy. Consider the standard example: Two glass enclosures, one (Y) is a perfect vacuum, the other *X) has 1 million Hydrogen (H2) molecules in it and one Helium (He) atom.

At the beginning of the thought-experiment, the probability that the He atom is in container X [p(X)] is 1.0, and the probability of it being in container Y [p(Y)] is 0.0

Now introduce a path between the two containers. Due to statistical mechanics, (and more coarsely, thermodynamics), the gas in X will migrate to Y over time. As it does so, the probability p(X) drops, and p(Y) increases, until an equilibrium is reached where p(X) = p(Y) = 0.5. There is a linear relationship between p(X) and p(Y) throughout this time.

The point of equilibrium is the point of maximum entropy and the point of minimum information. Conversely, the starting conditions are the point of minimum entropy, and maximum information.

You therefore have a starting state where entropy is a minimum and information a maximum. You have a final state where entropy is a maximum and information a minimum. You have a linear progression between the two points. This is an inverse relationship between information and entropy.

QED.

Perhaps I should point out that my PhD was in information processing using Neural Networks. The information contained within the feature-sets used was characterised by loss-of-entropy within those feature sets as information increased. Ignoring the hand-waving argument above, I could probably still do the maths to prove the case as well... Trust me that the argument above is a *lot* easier to follow...

Simon.

Re:Pattern Recognition

[perkr]

Entropy in statistical mechanics and entropy in information theory are not the same thing

Re:Pattern Recognition

[Space cowboy]

Entropy in statistical mechanics and entropy in information theory are not the same thing

I'm aware of that, but the mathematical derivation works fine. I was trying to demonstrate the point without resorting to some pretty unfriendly maths and the information-theory version comes to the same equations via a far less obvious route... I did say it was a 'hand-waving' argument...

Simon

First thing...

[Weird O'Puns]

..that came to my mind after reading the headline was this.

Keyword density?!

[Short Circuit]

When I search for something, I don't want to get a page that's a marketing front for what I'm trying to find, I want an informational, probably technical, page on the item I'm searching for.

Such pages don't usually mindlessly repeat the keyword I'm searching for over and over again.

Re:Keyword density?!

[jayzee]

From the article:

The first major difference that jumps out in the Yahoo results is the preference Yahoo's algorithm seems to have for more words on a page.

This seems to favour not only keyword density, but also dense wording in general. Please don't tell the marketing dept. I nearly had them believing that less is more...

Re:Keyword density?!

[Short Circuit]

Come to think of it, search engines used to work that way. And many intra-site search engine packages still do. (Like a lot of OEM sites out there.)

Keeping that in mind was part of knowing how to effectively use a search engine. Perhaps Google's spoiled me. :)

Re:Yahoo?

[TwistedSpring]

Thanks for clearing that one up. I did read that part of the article, but I was actually wondering where the results were coming from (whatever algorithm you use, you need to use it on a data set). Now I know.

I use Teoma a lot these days, it's very much like Google was about 6 years ago. Fresh, relevant and speedy. Plus their twist on pagerank is a pretty sweet idea that's worth a look.

My little test..

[CoolCat]

Just typed in the company I work for name (8 employees). First hit on google, yahoo.. I gave up after 9 pages..

Re:My little test..

[tachin]

Well i typed the name of the company i work for and i got a link in the first page of yahoo results but nothing on the first 10 result pages from google, so we could say your test and my test are just "anecdotal"...

Re:My little test..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... We're 12 people, and we're the first hit on both Google and Yahoo. :)

Re:My little test..

[meta-monkey]

When I type in keywords relevant to the business I own in yahoo, my site comes up first, and my 9 or so competitors are all on the first or second page. When I type those same keywords in Google, five of us (myself included) are nowhere to be seen.

I hope more people start using Yahoo.

Re:My little test..

[MrHanky]

My test is to search for MrHanky. If http://slashdot.org/~MrHanky is not on top of the list, the search engine is crap. This means:

Yahoo - useless
MSN Beta - understands that I've taken my nick from South Park (sponsored link) - bonus point, but still useless: it corrected my speling, and a real search for MrHanky still didn't get results. Interestingly, the first relevant hit was from a discussion about MSN Messenger.
AltaVista - 2. result. I can cope with that.
Google - We have a winner.

Re:My little test..

[Afty0r]

Just typed in the company I work for name (8 employees). First hit on google, yahoo.. I gave up after 9 pages..

Does your company have a website? If not, then it's a good job you have up after 9.

Re:My little test..

[squiggleslash]

In fairness, I'd have thought that the occasional South Park website would stand a good chance of being #1 in your case...

Does anyone ever do this and find it bizarre how much stuff they've written ends up on other websites? The worst offenders seem to be online bookstores with Amazon reviews - try searching for a phrase from a book review you've written on Amazon and seeing how many matches you find.

Re:My little test..

[levar]

weird. I just tried my company (5 employees). First hit on yahoo and not in the top 15 pages on google.

It's All Magic...

[photonX]

I'm one of those greybeards who was writing college reports in the pre-BBS days, never mind the World Wide Web. Remembering back to when I used to spend a half-day of research in the library to mine info that now magically appears on my computer screen in ten seconds, well...it's hard to throw stones. I'm just happy the damned things work at all.

Re:It's All Magic...

[AndroidCat]

Of course, "Proof by Google" is always right. After all, if it's on a web page and Google finds it, then it must be true .. right? :^P

Re:It's All Magic...

[Araneas]

I shave but the moustache is getting a little white. ;)

What I miss is looking in the card catalogue under the general subject and being able to pull out all sorts of related material I hadn't thought of. Same for browseing the stacks. Grab the general Dewey number and go surf the titles.

Wetware fuzzy logic at its best.

Re:It's All Magic...

[Short Circuit]

It drives me crazy that I can cite several sources online whenever I get into an argument with my parents, and all they say is "Well, if it's on the internet, it must be true." </sarcasm>

What good is all those billions of pages, if the people you're trying to convince refuse to believe a word of it that they disagree with?

Teoma vs Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Search for "slash" in Google and the results are:

1) Slashdot
2) Slash's Snakepit ...

Put the same "slash" keyword and search with Teoma:

1) Slash's Snakepit
2) Slashdot ...

Personally for this keyword search I feel Slash's Snakepit is more relevant and belongs at the top of the heap.

Re:Teoma vs Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Slash's homepage and his first record is called "Slash's Snakepit".

Re:Teoma vs Google

[Snowmit]

I would have thought that the most appropriate result for "slash" would have been some hot Kirk on Spock action.

So I guess Booble wins.

Re:Teoma vs Google

[Apiakun]

google it :)

So that's what happened!

[peterdaly]

I've been on vacation and away from internet and most mass media for a week. Got back on Monday and have noticed a drop in traffic to my web sites while I was gone. Didn't have a clue why. Well, now I know.

I'll be watching this very closely. Inktomi (sp?) sucked, which is what this is based on. I think it's too early to tell right now if the results are any good. Along the same lines, it will probably take about 6 months for marketers to learn to effectivly spam the results, which is something Google has historically been very good at keeping at bay.

This will be interesting to watch over the next few months.

-Pete

Re:So that's what happened!

[queen of everything]

That's interesting. I've notice the reverse with mine. Slurp (Yahoo!'s bot) has been coming to my site almost hourly getting different pages for the past 2 weeks or so. I've also noticed a HUGE increase of referrers from search.yahoo.com. Usually all the referrers from search engines were from Google. Now, Yahoo! is much more frequent.

Once yahoo changed over to Inktomi's search, I did several different searches for keywords or terms tha I want to be listed for. Surprisingly, I am ranked much higher on yahoo than Google right now for some things. I haven't changed anything in my code, its just interesting to see how the different search engines interpret the same thing.

Re:So that's what happened!

[Moeses]

Lets see, you stop using the web and your website stops getting hits...maybe you're the only one that looks at them? ;)

Warning: You are being watched!

[walter.]

Looks like someone is counting the slashdot community. One of the links in this post points to

http://www.searchguild.com/redir/o.php?out=http:// www.gorank.com/research/01072004_Google_Density_Re port.php

So someone at searchguild.com is counting every slashdot visitor who clicks on that link! The unredirected link points here.

Re:Warning: You are being watched!

[PaschalNee]

Hmmm ... searchguild.com. Could that be the guild?
I agree that it is advisable to click on the direct link or, if clicking on the original link, at least to wear a tin foil hat to prevent falling under the mind control of the new world order.

Re:Warning: You are being watched!

[wine]

This is no big deal. Unless you have configured your browser in a special way, it will gladly give out the URL of the page you were coming from to the page you are going to.

The HTTP 1.1 standard includes this "referrer" statement in the headers of http. Following the direct link you posted, and watching mozilla discuss with the server through the mozilla module Live HTTP Headers, you can see your browser gives out this information:

Referer: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 2/25/0857235&mode=nested

Re:Warning: You are being watched!

[cubic6]

I think what original poster was referring to is that the clicks are being collected not by the article or it's authors, but by whoever submitted the link. If you went via the actual address of the article, only the article's server (gorank.com) would get that referrer. Due to the addition in the link, all visitors from slashdot get redirected through a page on searchguild.com, which may be collecting data.

Re:Warning: You are being watched!

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the subject matter, I would be more inclined to believe that it was an attempt to game Google.

Inbound links from popular websites like Slashdot are treated as very valuable by Google. In this instance, searchguild.com is getting all the Google-love from Slashdot instead of the website that should be getting it, gorank.com.

Re:Warning: You are being watched!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another side effect is that gorank does NOT see the Slashdot referrer, but lots of searchguild referrers.

Re:Warning: You are being watched!

[tswann01]

Ha. They don't know their target market very well, do they?

We don't RTFA.

W3 compliance?

[valentyn]

Slightly off topic: yesterday someone said that Google ranks W3-compliant pages higher than non-W3 compliant pages. I'm still confused. Could this be true?

Re:W3 compliance?

[Aphrika]

In theory, it makes sense for Google to prioritise pages that adhere to W3C standards.

Over-generalising here, it means you get a lot of professional sites rather than little Timmy's Frontpage creation, however, being a large corporation doesn't guarantee you a decently constructed site, and is no guarantee of it being W3C compliant.

But then, Google probably sees this as a possible 80:20 rule - with the majority of W3C compliant sites probably offering something useful to index ,and index well, so they get priority over a page of junk that may or may not contain useful information.

Re:W3 compliance?

[Diplo]

My personal experience with my own website says this is true. When I redesigned it so it validated as XHTML1.1 Strict the number of hits I got from Google increased by a massive amount.

I believe Google actually respects a well-formed document and weights (for example) keywords found in header ( H1 - H6) tags above those found in, say, paragraph tags. It also extrapolates info from the much under-used TITLE and ALT tags, which a lot of WYSIWIG desined sites fail to incorporate properly.

Plus, as anyone who has played with XML can tell you, a well-formed document is easier to parse than one that's composed of tag-soup.

Re:W3 compliance?

[BReflection]

This is interesting considering Google is not even W3C compliant. I guess when your on top you don't follow rules, you make them.

Re:W3 compliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's so they don't index themselves...

Imagine how bad that would be, if Google started recursively indexing itself, it would only be a matter of hours until the world blew up, or something...

Re:W3 compliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you use XHTML 1.1 if the current spec is only 1.0 ?

Re:W3 compliance?

[JimDabell]

It's certainly possible, but as Google's own website is not valid, I doubt it's part of Google's strategy.

The main thing to remember is that the Googlebot is like a web browser you cannot test in. You have no idea what parts of HTML it supports, and what bugs it can work around. You know the old problem with Netscape 4.x, where, if you leave off a closing </table> tag, it doesn't see any of the table? Who knows how many of those types of errors Google has problems with?

The bottom line is that if you want some arbitrary user-agent to understand your website (in this case Google), then you really don't have any option but to write valid HTML. If you don't, you are gambling, plain and simple.

Re:W3 compliance?

[Diplo]

Because It isn't.

See?

Re:W3 compliance?

[AeroIllini]

> This is interesting considering Google is not even W3C compliant.

Yes, but take a look at the *nature* of their non-compliance. They don't have a !DOCTYPE declaration, but when I substitute an HTML 4.01 Transitional for them, the only errors I get are: missing "type" attribute on <style> and <script> tags, and missing quotes around all other tags' attributes. That's all. So even though they are not following the exact letter of the W3C compliance, they still write incredibly good code that renders properly in every browser on the planet, without having to resort to gimmicks like alternate stylesheets.

Their search results page seems to have similar results. The only additional mistakes I saw were a few missing "alt" attribtes in an <img> tag, a few <img> tags without "src" attributes (they are 1px x 1px placeholders), and some nesting issues with <tr>, <td> and <form> tags. These are a little more serious, but are easily changed within the page generation script.

Perhaps as a community, Slashdot should email suggestions@google.com and recommend W3C compliance. A few small changes in the code will help Google become a forerunner in standards compliance. Google already does many, many things right... why not add standards compliance?

Re:W3 compliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but then the question is, why in the bottom corner of the w3c page do they say their page is xhtml 1.0 compliant. If 1.1 is the standard, why would the w3c themselves not be using it?

Re:W3 compliance?

[mbauser2]

Google doesn't give a rat's ass if a page complies to W3C standards. That would be a stupid way to run a search engine, because that would let junk sites boost their rank for superficial reasons while punishing relevant sites that have minor mistakes. Google is about content, first and foremost, and following standards doesn't improve content.

When it comes to web design issues, Google does not punish naive mistakes. If somebody's HTML is so weird that it must be an attempt at manipulation (like making an entire paragraph out of H1 elements), it might get penalized. Other stuff, Google doesn't care about, because any strategy that penalizes most of the web is counterproductive to their goals.

That said, Googlebot is computer program, so it probably does a better job of parsing pages that are well-formed (in the XML sense), and otherwise "easy to parse". Following standards is a good way to achieve "easy parsibility", so Google occasionally gives the "check your HTML" advice to people becuase it's easier than writing everything I ust wrote.

Missing the google point?

[ItsIllak]

Isn't this missing the point of how google works? OK, so it measures the success, but it won't tell you anything (or much) about the actual search algorythm as google is actually basing the score not only on the page you link to but also pages that link to IT.

Hence, it's an interesting read, and maybe you could draw your own preferences from what the weighting turns out to be in the listed cases, but it's not a very fair representation of how google works. *NB* I've no clue how Yahoo/Inktomi works, so I couldn't comment.

Re:Missing the google point?

[base_chakra]

sn't this missing the point of how google works? OK, so it measures the success, but it won't tell you anything (or much) about the actual search algorythm as google is actually basing the score not only on the page you link to but also pages that link to IT.

I think you're the one who missed the point. Among other things, one can use these figures to estimate optimal keyword density, and then strive to achieve that density in one's own sites. It also helps to determine what parts of a URL Google weights the most heavily.

Sale sites.

[Bender Unit 22]

I have seen that sites that does nothing but sells stuff, has gotten higher rankings lately. But maybe I just need to be more specific in my searches.

If you're "wading through 10-15 pages of results"

[jbellis]

you need to change your google preference from 10 results displayed to something larger...

if you have already done this and you're still wading through that many pages of results you suck at specifying what you want to search for :)

They are different

[samsmithnz]

For example if I search for me (Sam Smith), I show up 4th on Google, but 51st on Yahoo.

I guess Yahoo really doesn't love me after all.

Re:They are different

[millahtime]

"...I search for me (Sam Smith), I show up 4th on Google, but 51st on Yahoo."

I did a search for myself in yahoo and google and I came up 9th on yahoo and 19th in google. Yahoo was more accurate even if by a little for me. Interestingly though is that the page that Yahoo found was a much more obscure page for a project I worked on 3 years ago. The same page the google found at 19, yahoo found at 20.

Re:They are different

[meta-monkey]

It's almost scary to google yourself, isn't it? I just did it and found a newspaper article I was quoted in from six years ago, a letter to the editor I wrote to my college newspaper and listings for various research projects I was a part of a long, long time ago. Thankfully, there's nothing incriminating there.

Also, it was interesting to see that I seem to be the only person on the Internet with my name. A search for my name in quotes, first and last, with either the long form or short form of my first name, turned up links ONLY to me. Thankfully, I've never done anything truly embarassing that wound up in the papers, so I guess I'm safe. How much would that suck to do something assinine 10 years ago, get a blurb in the online version of your town's newspaper, and then have it turn up every time somebody searched for your name for the rest of your life? Ouch.

Re:They are different

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, it was interesting to see that I seem to be the only person on the Internet with my name.

Yeah, well, I know I don't run into many guys called 'meta-monkey'.

Why the search engines go from bad to worse

[Anonymous Coward]

'Entropy'.
Yes! and they will even get worse. It is only a natural phenomena..Everything in this universe has to obey it including information and thus the search engines..

The Problem with Search Algorithm Monocultures

[G4from128k]

While I know that various search engines use various core ideas in search, I would think that a better way to search would use multiple approaches. Some combination of link-based analysis, keyword analysis, expert analysis, cluster-analysis, etc. rather than a single "this-is-how-we-do-it-here" algorithm.

The first big challenge in search is in disambiguating what the searcher really wants without requiring a long string of inputs. A multiple-algoithmic approach would let a search engine serve up hits gathered in multiple ways (e.g., hit number 1 was top ranked using mehtod 1, hit #2 was top ranked using methd 2, etc.). The search company could then see which algorithm provides the best hits for a given search (i.e., by watching which hits the searcher clicks on).

The second big challenge is all the nasty spammers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) who will try to use knowledge of any search algorithm to game the system and artificially raise their page rank for commerical purposes. This is probably one reason why Google cannot maintain dominance - any dominant search enegine attracts the concerted efforts of SEOs, thus ruining its search quality, thus ruining its dominance.

Yet a multi-algorithmic search engine could create a moving target that frustrates SEOs. By rotating the algorithms and even using negative weights on some algorithm results, a multi-algorithmic search company could cause high-ranked pages to plummet in rank over time. One week, a heavily keyworded site (e.g., one listing every possible keyword in metadata) might be at the top of the list, the next week it is at the bottom of the list. This raises the cost to sites trying to game the system. (The search company might even reward or penalize sites that change structure to often to either find the freshest sites or penalize the efforts of SEO).

There never can be one right way to do search.

Re:The Problem with Search Algorithm Monocultures

[meta-monkey]

Is search engine optimization really that evil? You create your site to serve information, what's wrong with trying to make sure that you show up well in the google rankings so you can serve that info?

You sell widgets, so you want good placement for "widget store." Who's to say that your web site is or isn't the best place to buy widgets? Optimize it, so that when somebody searches for "widget store" they find you. The searcher is happy because he got his widget, and you're happy because you sold it to him. Everybody wins.

Re:The Problem with Search Algorithm Monocultures

[evilad]

In the article's example, hit #2 for "prozac suicide" links to a page discussing mexican recipes. The page bears no relevance whatsoever to the search terms, except that you can possibly find a way to buy prozac from the page.

It is ad-pollution, plain and simple.

Re:The Problem with Search Algorithm Monocultures

[0x0d0a]

"Evil" is meaningless.

It's clearly in search engine spammers' benefit to do so (much like email spammers).

It also clearly disadvantages users, since PageRank is a pretty good metric (outside of people trying to game the system) of usefulness.

You clearly have some interest in discussing SEO. The parent has some interest in discussing thwarting SEO. I'd that that the second subject has at least as much merit (as in, it benefits a large group of people a good deal), and is certainly equally interesting.

Now, it's true that simply eliminating SEO-using sites may not be worthwhile -- it's possible that some SEO-using sites have merit, and over-penalization is possible.

Increasing the difficulty of SEO analysis is interesting. A couple of other interesting possibilities:

* It might be interesting to try to specifically identify users trying to "game the system" and start feeding them slightly shuffled results. As long as the shuffling isn't too heavy, it even false positives with this shouldn't be too painful.

* It might be interesting to try to identify sites attempting to utilize SEO and penalize them. Frankly, the kind of sites that use SEO are generally the sort of thing that I *don't* want to find.

* Not quite as nice, but it might be interesting to try to identify clouds of SEO sites. For example, Google seeds an inverse trust network by posting to an SEO site (and posing as an SEO) a particularly complex approach to SEO. A site implementents it, and it is immediately a "known using SEO" site. Google tries to identify sites that are "related to" it a la PageRank and looks for sites that adopt similar measures, considering them to be SEO-ized sites with a somewhat smaller probability.

Re:The Problem with Search Algorithm Monocultures

[meta-monkey]

I think of SEO as "designing my site so it's easy for search engines to find and rank." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. First, design to make it easy for people to navigate. Then, tweak to make it easy for search engines to rank you.

For instance, you have the option of either using a graphical banner at the top of your page to display the title with some pretty graphic or font. Or, you can use H1 tags to accomplish the same thing. Which should you use? It isn't really going to matter much to the viewer, but using text allows Google to index the words in that text, so you'll get a better rank for those search terms. Uh oh, my site has now been "optimized" for a search engine. Do you not want to visit my site anymore, even though it contains the information you're after? After all, it's been search engine optimized.

As another poster noted, there's a difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Manipulation. You go through a lot of time and effort to set up a web site to serve some information to the public. The public often uses search engines to find information. Since there IS a difference between how a person interprets a site and how a robot can interprete a site, what's wrong with tweaks that help the robot index your site if it doesn't effect a person's ability to navigate and read your site? Remember, robots can't interprete images.

On the other hand, if you're intentionally misleading the search engine, then that's wrong. If people are searching for "chicken soup recipes" and you're trying to get your penis enlargement pills website to show up for "chicken soup recipes" then you're manipulating the search engine, in a deliberate attempt to return poor results.

Search engine optimization is a good thing all web designers should do. We design websites to serve information to people, so let's make it easy for people to find our website. Search engine manipulation is the equilvalent of email spam, and efforts should be taken to prevent it.

Re:The Problem with Search Algorithm Monocultures

[WMSplat]

Wrong. There is almost certainly a truth-telling mechanism for the search engine functionality. Truth-telling here means that the optimal behavior for a site to get hits is to tell the truth about the page's content (ie. no trickery). Of course, the mechanism would also almost certainly be very slow to run, but still...

"Monocultures" tend to be bad, but they don't have to be.

Summary

[Sieni]

Could the editors please put a summary of the results, so that we don't have to RTFA.

SEO - SEM

[peterdaly]

As someone who does search engine optimization of his own sites, I believe there is an important distinction between ethical and non-ethical (spam) activities.

Search Engine Optimization - doing all things possible to tell a search engine what your page is about while being balanced for humans to read as well. Ethical. Sometime considered spam when really the search engine returns poor results; usually due to the page you are looking for not being easy to understand for spiders.

Search Engine Manipulation - trying to doing things to get search engines to return your page in results when the page may not otherwise be something the engine considers relevent or high quality. Showing something different for the search engine falls under this category, is commonly refered to as cloaking, and is against many search engines "rules" for designing pages. Not ethical, aka spam.

-Pete

Re:SEO - SEM

[silentbozo]

The problem is that telling the public what your site is about is equivalent to telling search engines what your page is about. Aside from meta-tags (which should really be all you need in order to communicate "additional" info to search engines), any change to your website to "optimize" for a specific type of search engine, and not for the general public, has the effect upgrading your page ranking AT THE EXPENSE OF NON-OPTIMIZED SITES.

Here we go into the slippery slope that leads to situations like the tradgedy of the commons (where people tend to use up a resource because it isn't theirs), the hiring of lawyers (statistically, if one side hires a lawyer, they get better results, but if both sides hire lawyers they get the same settlement, only smaller because of lawyers fees), etc. It's the prisoner's dilemma - defect (ie, optimize) to improve my position, at the risk of everybody else defecting and earning worse returns than non defecting in the first place (ie, everybody stops using google because the rankings are screwed up and are no longer trustworthy.)

Put simply, the moment any site tries to game the system, even just a little bit, they ruin the usefulness of Google. As it stands, I'm getting better results with Metacrawler now than with Google - something I wouldn't have said just a year ago. Don't even get me started on websites with javascript-redirect gateway pages, or the ones that scrape search-engine/newsgroup/eBay pages for text in order to boost hit counts, and then link back to similar pages in order to get higher link relevancy, OR the ones that take over abandoned domains in order to exploit the ranking generated by pre-existing links that point to the domain name...

Re:SEO - SEM

[RevDobbs]

Aside from meta-tags (which should really be all you need in order to communicate "additional" info to search engines), any change to your website to "optimize" for a specific type of search engine, and not for the general public, has the effect upgrading your page ranking AT THE EXPENSE OF NON-OPTIMIZED SITES.

But like the "SEO v. SEM" argument above, search engine optimization done right will also give better results to the end user.

Think about it: if I'm looking for the specs on Widget A and the best damn website on Widget A makes me sit through a 135 second flash animation before I can get to any usefull content, I'm going to miss all that valuable information because I'm not wasting my time or bandwidth loading that crap.

Now, what if the second best Widget A site is ran by people with a clue: title tags contain the important keywords ("bulk pricing", "failure modes", "Mil/Commercial/Industrial specification compliance"), easy-to-use navigation that tells me by the link text this is what I want? Well, than this is the most useful site, and should be ranked higher than the others.

Search engines are just distiliers of information; super-quick page scanners. If you make your page human-scanable and easy to use, your relevence will rise higher than other pages. By effectivly telling people what your pages are about, you'll be effectivly telling the search engines what your pages are about.

Google is good for one thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free porn.

Re:Yahoo?

[WhodoVoodoo]

Why don't you google it?

or yahoo it.

No, that just doesn't sound right.
Google: 1
Yahoo: sounds like something I call my neighbor

They are search engine spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah trying to figure out how to get to the top of search engines by analysing keyword density so you can then construct copy text with fake entry pages or as the se.spammers call them "gateway" pages with 302 redirects via the useragent or constructing urls/with/the/keywords using ModRewrite

we know what they are up to, spamming search engines peddling shite with their refferer links

fuckers, these people are the reason 90% of search engines suck and who are rapidly poising google so in 5 years no-one can find shit without being taken for circlejerks and wading through shitty websites peddling porn,viagra and whatever shit is flavour of the month, if thats what the internet i see is gonna turn into then why the fuck do i bother

and we link em here at slashdot
i wouldnt give these people the time of day

A>S

Re:Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Teoma a lot these days, it's very much like Google was about 6 years ago.

Nice try, except Google wasn't around six years ago... I believe it launched in September 1998.

All I know...

[Ironix]

Is that I'm pissed off for suddenly loosing my ranking a month ago. I used to be in almost every spot for the top 30 results for the keyword "QQQ", but now I am below 100. =(

Cocks.

[WhodoVoodoo]

Actually, I find an intersting way to rate search engines is to search for the word "cocks"

yeah, I know what your thinking.

You typically get a couple things from this search:

Porn (duh)
Chicken related things
and the band "The Revolting Cocks"

By looking at which ones come up first, you can infer some interesting and useful things about how an engine works. What those things are I will let you decide.
Mostly because it's funnier.

But seriously, folks, try it out.

Re:Cocks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try setting the Safesearch Yahoo Preferences to STRICT.

I've no idea what the default is, I think its the middle setting. Google looks like it has the high setting.

Re:If you're "wading through 10-15 pages of result

[Anonymous Coward]

There also is a problem with the internet content these days. There is many more pages with little content.

For intstance if I want to learn about symmetry operations on the electronic structure of silicon I can search for the "symmetry electronic structure silicon", but this returns a slew of research grade articles which are tangental to the basic subject.

So I can use the words "Basic" or "Introduction" in the search and now I've found pages and pages of intro to solid state course outlines. But there is no real content here either. At the best PPT slides, but these aren't that useful without the lecture.

I suppose that the trick is developing AI to distinguish content from a list of names.

more isnt always better

[dpw2atox]

From what I have seen in the past as well as currently more results is not always better. One of the primary reasons I use google as my search engine is because it has very accurate results. I would rather have a search engine display 10 results which are accurate than 100 results which are completly wrong. This article might show that yahoo displays more results in certain areas but I plan on using both services for searches over the next few weeks to see which one is more accurate.

Comapre the Algorithms manually

[GoogleGuy]

The challenge for Google and Yahoo is to filter out the SEO spam (Doorways, cloaking, ...)

Check out the algorithms yourself by comparing google and yahoo search results side by side.

And right below the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is an ad for Google's AdSense!

Vs Yahoo

[paragon_au]

Try yahoo, slashdot is all the way down to 6th.

While google's 4th result Slash Online (Offical fanpage of slash) is now at the number 1 postion.

Insightful?

[paragon_au]

This post is nothing more than a flame. These people are not spamming search engines, they are attempting to research the accuraccy of the two search engines. Just because some of their research can be used for 'evil' doesn't mean that these people have done anything wrong. "Stupid guy who invented the wheel, if the wheel has never been invented car bombs would never have been invented and the world would be a much better place.I wouldn't give him the time of day."

Re:Insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

from their webpage
"Tools that unlock the secret of ranking 1st in the search engines."

like bulk email and tools have nothing to do with spam

who do you think "search optimisation" is aimed at ? optimised for who ? if my page is relavent to the persons search why do i need to optimise it ?

if you see a spade call it a spade

Re:Insightful?

[0x0d0a]

It *is* a flame, but the criticism in it is legitimate. These people are clearly targeting SEO (search engine optimizers/spammers), based on pretty clear words in their article.

Besides, why would a legitimate researcher care about word density in Google? It's just not interesting research -- you're analysing an algorithm that you know nothing of. It'd be much better to make your own research search engine and analyze *its* results, and get something useful, interesting, and possibly publishable.

That being said, ultimately the flaw is with Google/Yahoo. They are exploitable (even if it's hard to pull off), and money can be made by people without risk. These guys are looking for data to build attacks. The fact that their attacks screw over a lot of other people sucks, but there you have it.

nr 4 loves you.

[leuk_he]

On the other hand Number 4 on the yahoo list loves you for giving up your place on number 4. as do nr 5 to number 50.

make up your mind...do you want 1 friend (yahoo) or 46?

Re:Yahoo?

[stanmann]

2004-1998=~6 For more details you can google

Was doing a little test and...

[l3pYr]

I was running query after query to see who came up with better results. I typed in 'quote AMD' and yahoo brough up a nice little stock quote with a graph. In google a generic graph icon was on top with a link to 'Show Stock quotes for AMD' ... it linked to Yahoo's finance page. Just thought that was a bit ironic..

Google search Mozilla

[bstil]

I don't use Google's homepage much, now that Mozilla Firebird/Firefox has the Google search box right next to the URL box! Thanks Mozilla team.

Re:Google search Mozilla

[osu-neko]

You can add this feature to IE with the downloadable Google search bar. It also adds popup blocking, which is really nice. OTOH, you can just both of these features with Firefox right out of the box, and not be vulnerable to every browser exploit that comes along too...

Re:Google search Mozilla

[bstil]

But Google toolbar might raise some privacy concerns. Here is their privacy policy. The IE toolbar does contact Google's servers to check page rank of the pages you visit.
Yahoo also has the Yahoo Companion toolbar.
For right now, I'll stick with Google from Mozilla Firefox browser.

The search engines just need moderation

[pj2541]

But the only choices should be "Interesting" and "Troll." If each vote added or subtracted a very small amount from the page rank, and steps were taken to prevent stuffing the ballot box, I think this would actually improve the search results for the users.

Re:The search engines just need moderation

[Golthur]

I can just see the spammers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSEOs writing automated "moderator-bots" to vote their pages "interesting"...

Re:The search engines just need moderation

[MikeBabcock]

This is what Google was originally designed for, fwiw.

Re:If you're "wading through 10-15 pages of result

[TheLink]

Actually google has got worse.

Now many of my web searches tend to turn up tons of mailing lists archives. If I want to search those I'd use google groups (I get about the same results for my search terms in google groups).

I'm actually not that surprised - when I first heard they were using Page Rank some years back, I wondered how long that would keep working. It's easy to manipulate, plus it's kind of circular.

Clarification!

[Ayanami Rei]

The article submitter is SPECIFICALLY trying to profile slashdot readership. Clearly the Anonymous Coward is either the article's author, or someone with a vested interest in our opinions on this topic, but someone who can't look at gorank's referral logs.

This is VERY sneaky (akin to putting an Amazon referral link in a book review).

Do NOT click on the link. If the submitter had actually bothered to use a logged in slashdot account, I would be more trusting.

Copy Link location, open new browser window, paste.

Re:Clarification!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or click it a zillion times and clear cookies each time. Might be cool if /. was overcounted instead of undercounted.

Re:Clarification!

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Or click it a zillion times and clear cookies each time.

Why click? If you want to put silly things in their logs, simply follow this stupid link, with cookies disabled it inlines the inline page in itself a few times before inlining the google cache of slashdot.

Bring it on

[tomblackwell]

SEO

You don't know what you're talking about. Please feel free to come here and try to ram your fist down my throat. It'll make my day.

I'm waiting for you...

what do the terms mean???

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere does the article explain what repeats and density mean and how they are calculated. What kind of report is this??

The first line of the google table shows 1001 5.1 2.4% (W, R, D). An obvious guess would be that the density is the percentage of the repeats in the words (d=r/w) but that is not what it is, so what is the density calculated from?

Re:what do the terms mean???

[Anonymous Coward]

according to a google on "define:keyword density",

"The number of times a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page. Expressed as a percentage. "
www.google-secrets.com/google-secrets-glossary. htm

But these tables all have the density percentage calculated incorrectly then. No one else on slashdot bothers to check the math?

In the first line, 1001 5.1 2.4% (W, R, D), 5.1 is .51% of 1001, NOT 2.4%

Is everyone using this guys faulty data to optimize their pages?

Calling yourself an SEO...

[Ayanami Rei]

is like a spammer calling himself an "eCommerce Marketing Agent"

When I want to search for something online, I do not want to see a webpage designed to snag my eyes.

AT ALL!

You do me and many other previously happy web users a great disservice.

You should encourage web page designers to make MORE USEFUL WEBPAGES rather than wasting their time trying to get search engines to notice them.

It is the job of the search engine to determine what page is most relevant, not the page authors themselves (directly). Because everyone wants to be most relevant. But frankly that fails because of something called the pigeonhole principle.

Guess what! 80% of people aren't better than average drivers either!

So please, accept my gift of a virtual knuckle sandwich.

That's right, mod me down.

[Ayanami Rei]

But you know I'm right. If you have similar sentiments, mod me back up. Let those fucknuts know how you feel about "Search Engine Optimization", i.e., "you'll never find an objective review about a commercial product EVER AGAIN with a search engine... HAHAHAHhAHAHHAAA"

SEO

[tomblackwell]

is marketing

Marketers attempt to help a company get their message across to those who would be interested in their product. If the company doesn't know what the search engines are looking for, it won't know where to concentrate their efforts in building the site.

An SEO will tell companies things which often end up sounding like common sense.

A marketer will tell a company things which often end up sounding like common sense.

They're two facets of the same thing.

Also consider:

without marketers, most people wouldn't have jobs.

Now fuck off.

Re:SEO

[0x0d0a]

Marketers attempt to help a company get their message across to those who would be interested in their product.

Yes. However, marketers also have little interest in the case of targetting people who are *not* interested in said products.

In the case of the Web, frequently marketer performance is measured by hits. Thus, marketers have incentive to mis-direct users to their site even if those users are not interested in a product.

Marketers are not in the business of simply informing people about a product. You absolutely do not need a whole department to manage that -- it's quite easy. Most marketing is designed to exploit human irrationality and quirks in the thought process and preferences to make humans make irrational purchasing decisions.

I don't hate SEOs any more than I hate politicians. Both are placed in a system that we designed that is exploitable. We screwed up, and the burden of fixing the system to not be exploitable lies on us -- come up with a better search engine, suggest some way to prevent people from mucking with results.

However, SEOs cause me about as much unhappiness and discomfort as email spammers do, so I'd hardly shed a tear if they all went out of business, say.

Ads good at filtering out crap

[0x0d0a]

I've had excellent luck using Google's ads for one thing -- when I'm looking for a retailer to buy something. Not infrequently when trying to buy something, I come up with plenty of garbage and irrelevant results, but the paid advertisements are there because the people are trying to sell me what I want (and they are interested in not wasting impressions on people that *aren't* interested in their product, so they have a positive incentive to focus their ads).

Re:Ads good at filtering out crap

[Anonymous Coward]

if you search for the product name, you're implying you want information about the product. if you want to find a place to buy the product, you should search for the product name + price or vendor or something to indicate that you're looking for a retailer.. i, for one, would hate to search for a product and only find vendors. usually i look for reviews first :)

My advice: work hard on content

[MarkWatson]

I am fortunate to be the number 1 hit for the keywords "Java consultant" on Google and Yahoo.

I have never played any games what so ever to get there. What I do however is try very hard to place interesting and useful content on my site (mostly 'free web books').

I don't think that it matters so much what you do in life so long as you love doing it. I have been programming computers since the early 1960s, and I still love it!

-Mark

Re:My advice: work hard on content

[ionizer]

Speaking of content the link to your demos page (http://www.markwatson.com/demos.php) is 404. You might want to work on your content...
Cheers!

Categorized approach

[Anonymous Coward]

WiseNut tries to categorize search results in order to enable you to "drill in" (I know that's probably not a good choice of words if you're searching for "cock"...) according to what category you're after.

Re:Categorized approach

[Anonymous Coward]

WiseNut tries to categorize search results in order to enable you to "drill in" (I know that's probably not a good choice of words if you're searching for "cock"...)

Yeas, well you're already talking about using WiseNut to search for cocks, so I wouldn't worry about terminology.

Interested in WHAT product?

[Ayanami Rei]

I can't thing of a single thing I bought online that I searched for directly in a search engine.

The way most people shop is 1) They use a search engine to find a retailer that has the kind of thing they're looking for combined with good reputation or price 2) They use the internal search engine to find the product they want.

Or they use a specialized product search engine like froogle.

So what are you helping them sell, exactly? Care to provide an example?

HA, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Users to modify their sites? Hell no! Yahoo and Google should tweak their algorithms. That's the *right* way to do it.

Yahoo uses more than keyword density

[elflet]

"Keyword density" is a favorite SEO trick for trying to get a page to rank more highly, along with engine-specific tricks (e.g. getting people to link to your page with they keywords you want in the link to drive a Google ranking higher. I just ran a handful of experiemnts with long-established (8+ years), high-ranking pages and found a few interesting things in Yahoo:

• Incoming link popularity appears to play a far smaller role than on Google. Pages that are "top of page 1" material in Google due to their oncoming links don't even show up on top of Yahoo.
• Yahoo is using the meta Description tag, at least in the display (but it also looks like they're using it for ranking.)
• They're giving extreme weight to items that show up in the Yahoo directory (which has been pay-for-inclusion for the most part the past several years.) In fact, one of my pages which has changed titles shows up in yahoo search under a 6 year old title (the one used to list it in the directory, natch.)
• Yahoo is also giving heavy weight to keywords that show up in URLs.
• Keyword cramming seems to move sites up on Yahoo (very annoying, especially for those of us who would rather get placed via honest content.)

To be honest, Yahoo's new engine reminds me of circa-1996 engines. Go run the same search on Yahoo and Google and see what comes back with better relevance (Google still looks better to me.)

Re:Yahoo uses more than keyword density

[MikeBabcock]

The only people I've noticed *not* liking Google lately who are excited about Yahoo's new engine are SEOs. People who actually *use* search engines all day should be very happy with how Google works.

I was reading an SEO discussion on a programming site earlier today and everyone was complaining about how buying keyword ads on Google didn't help their ranking for those keywords in the search results (of course not; it just buys you ad-space).

Pagerank rules

[Camel Pilot]

Someone help me out here. Google heavly relies on pagerank and thus keyword relevance based on volume and quality of links pointing to you. Could it be that word density is completely irrelevant?

Is this not a classic case of correlation not equal to causation?

MOD PARENT RIGHT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuff said

$25/hour?

[wodelltech]

I am complete befuddled as to how/why you charge so low with so much experience and a top Google rank. What's up? Is money just not an issue?

Re:$25/hour?

[MarkWatson]

Thanks for asking.

I live in a really remote area (mountains of Northern Arizona), so I work mostly by telecommuting.

A few years ago, I worked with a bunch of very talented Russian guys and also very talented Brazilian developers. They received a very low pay by our standards, and I consider a telecommuting U.S. programmer has to, in the long run, compete with foreign developers. Because of my experience, and "time zone advantage", I set my rates at about double what a very good overseas developer gets.

Actually, with my current consulting rates and book royalties, I am very satisfied with the living that I make.

-Mark

Re:$25/hour?

[wodelltech]

Interesting answer...and far better than "oh no! some one hacked my site and removed the 0 from 250"...that I feared. :)

Seriously, it's good to see motivation other than pure $ at work in the world.

Yeah but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it find the Meaning of Life?

Google don't use keywords to search pages (??)

[rofthorax]

I thought that they just used the google toolbar to determine what keyword searches lead to correct results by monitoring how long someone stays on a page and using the log of events from the toolbar to feed these findings.. So if you searched for "Pentium 4" First hand it may do a search by keyword to find the Pentium 4's but the product is faced up according to how many people before you had also done this search, and the rankings of the various results based on the success of the outcome.. Like if the multitude of searchers ended up browsing the DELL page, then Dell would appear above all else at the top of the page. So no matter how many keywords you have in your page, it won't have a chance against the pages that people tend to look at.. However if you can flood the database with pages with all relevant keywords, then maybe you can keep people from ever getting favorable results for those keyword searches, then nothing ever gets ranked.. That's the experience you've had if you've gone looking for (ahem) "swimsuit" and you get all the porn pages with 10,000 keywords in them. Unless people actually go weeding out the swimsuit pages from the crap, nobody will see anything relevant at the top of the page.. This is why it seems google can read our minds, as yahoo doesn't even come close.. Yahoo doesn't use the outcome of the search in the computation of future searches.. So Faaaa to Yahoo, keyword searches in pages is only half the problem..

SE Dictatorship

[Via_Patrino]

I've a nice information webpage, it's in fact a free (as in speech) online book.

It's very informative, but how it's about a relative popular subjective it doesn't show up on google's top 10, and depending of the searching terms not even on top 50.

On the other side I see a lot of pages selling products (often the same product) in front of mine, a lot of them use:
- marketing terms: advertise a product that isn't exactly what it says, but it's what people search for (the magical solution). Example: "remove all your virus!"
- SEO: you know what's that, I won't teach people how because I don't like the way it's usually used.

As nowadays about 90% of the referes to a webpage is a SE if I don't fit my page for them I'll have a very small number of viewers and the information I spent time wroting will be useless.

I don't like that idea, I prefer my page human friendly not SE friendly, but I'll need to make my page look like a "scamming page". That doesn't mean I'll use dirt tricks or being unethical, but it definitly won't look the way I liked it.

Welcome to SE dictatorship!

How to get to top of google!! For spammers!!

[rofthorax]

First get 100 of your best friends,
get each with a google toolbar on their browser..

Have each search for the same set of keywords, but have them all click on your page..

Have then spend about 5 minutes on that page..
Then have them all close their browser..

Do this again and again for several other keyword combinations..

Do this procedure as much as possible, and you will find your page ranking at the top of the results of the keyword searches you performed..

What would be better is to automate this.. Write some viralent programs that infect people's machines then perform these rigged searches and send fake outcomes to google.. Why I suggest making a virus or a trojan hoarse? The searches are bound to be keyed to IP addresses, if you have one IP address acting like 100 users, the google search database could place less significance on result outcomes that affect only a small portion of the Internet community.. It could be the algorithm uses a ratio of users with unique IP addresses to all the IP addresses to determine relevance as well..

If you say "That's impossible, there is no way I can do that.." Precisely, that's why this whole discussion of keyword searches on a page is moot..

Missing Domain Name Data Points

[PetoskeyGuy]

Domain Names.

Search Engines definately give rank to domains which contain your keyword in them. Tons of sites out there seem to have figured this out to make searches useless. There are tons of "keyword.useless-site.com" dictionary pages out there.

I would really like to see the search engines be able to figure out that certain pages make no sense. They read like something from the old SNL subliminal man skits. Or site that bounce you somewhere else as soon as you arrive.

Not magic -- it's the Batcave!

[pjack76]

When I was a kid there was some ridiculous superhero cartoon on which Batman and Robin would ask their computer something, and the computer would just magically know the answer...

And mother always said "No, pjack76, you can't have a Bat computer, there's no such thing as an all-knowning machine..."

Look Out For Yahoo! Lawyers...

[herrvinny]

According to Whois information (CAPTCHA required), yahooslurp.com is owned by a flower store site. How long until Yahoo figures this out and hammers the store into the ground?

Re: Searching by name

[WuphonsReach]

Which is exactly how this lad got himself caught. His prospective date decided to search his name on the web and got a nice hit from the FBI's wanted list.

The conclusion for the article

[danila]

For those too lazy to RTFA:

Conclusion

Well, we planned to do a completely different report this month, but figured Yahoo is probably what is on the mind of many SEO experts at the moment. Hopefully this research provides some useful data you might be able to incorporate into your SEO efforts.We have plans for our next report but it will probably change in the coming weeks. If you have any ideas please let us know. You can email us at info at gorank.com. We plan to do many more reports. If you would like to join our mailing list to be notified when we issue a new report please enter your email address below.

Please feel free to mod down (-1: Uninformative)... :)

Rich-media Relevance

[drpentode]

I think if Google and Yahoo! log SCORM and semantic web information, searches will be a lot a lot more relevant, especially image, video and audio searches.

Troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing doesn't work. Type in anything
other than slashdot and it doens't do anything.

analysis not impressive

[wjzhu]

I tried the web page analysis: they include html words as normal words. Pretty lame website. But they know how to make useless data look good, with lots of entries and percentages in a table.

sloppy averaging

[pudgybuddy]

the simplest explanation is that averaging is done in different places. using the top line from above: 2.4% is the density value (repeats/words) averaged over the 2000 first ranked pages; while words and repeats are total words/2000 and total repeats/2000. *if* this is the case, density is more useful than repeats/words. just consider an outlier page that is 100% repeats: it will boost the repeats/words ratio by a huge amount if the page is, say, one million words long, but the density number wont be affected---its just averaged in with the other 1999 as one data point of 100%, totally regardless of page length. notwithstanding, this article is a pretty half-ass "analysis"....

Google Versus Yahoo -- And Results

[etLux]

As an operation with several dozen websites with fairly substantial traffic, we tend to look at all this from the other direction. Google consistently delivers a whopping THIRTY TIMES more traffic than Yahoo, network-wide. Guess whose "algorithm" we like better...

Re:Hello, Guns 'N' Roses

[Anonymous Coward]

You remember this band, they were huge back in the late 80s and early 90s? The guitarist, Slash, started his own band Slash's Snakepit but he has ditched that band as it was not going anywhere and he is now part of Velvet Revolver with other ex-G'N'R bandmates(but not Axl Rose), with Scott Weiland as the frontman.

I think it is more relevant for Slash's Snakepit to be higher because it actually fits for the keyword. Slashdot is more of a tangent, I assuming alot of people are linking to slashdot like this:

Slash

Slashdot and Slashcode are compound words that contain the word Slash, but they are not Slash, so I think it is clear that Teoma wins this little faux comparison.

$20 a month!?!

[nuntius]

My roommate and I each spend $22/month ($44/month total) for broadband access. And you're saying another $20/month for a better Google is worthwhile?

$5/month is pushing the limit. Most users would balk at even $2/month simply because of the hassle and risks of more spam/credit card theft.

congratulations

[clsc]

You've all been participating in an interactive marketing campaign for a search engine optimization company... innovative way to do it, i'd say.

code to index text

[Anonymous Coward]

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