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