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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."
So you are way out of touch, I'm afraid
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
That's why They have: http://Search.yahoo.com
Yahoo! Switches Search Engines (Wednesday February 18, @09:51AM) has the info on when this happened.
Actually you can directly go here, http://search.yahoo.com which is more or less clean.
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.
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.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
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.
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.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
0 2/25/0857235&mode=nested
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/
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.
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.
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.
2004-1998=~6 For more details you can google
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
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.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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.
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.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
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).
May we never see th
- 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.)and of course, a quick peek at imdb.com/robots.txt could explain why...
/ActorSearch /ActressSearch /AddRecommendation ...
# robots.txt for http://imdb.com/
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
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
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Here is where to file a complaint at google. Fast and easy to do, don't hesitate...
This is the only good use of Flash I've seen. My nephew likes it, anyway.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
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.
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.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
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.