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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."
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.
...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.
Just grab a friend and a deck of cards, and you can play Yahoo vs. Google at home.
The speed of time is one second per second.
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?
Can I bum a sig?
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)).
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
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Just typed in the company I work for name (8 employees). First hit on google, yahoo.. I gave up after 9 pages..
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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?
my other sig is a 500 page novel
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.
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.
>>
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
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.
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 prozac suicide. prozac nation nude Viagra prozac hair loss Paxil
prozac dogs Yasmin ssri prozac Propecia prozac ocd.
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,
Suicide Prozac Suicide. Prozac(R) is a selective serotonin
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.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
What about Google's perpetual data retention and refusal to say what they may or may not do with the info?
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.
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.
"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.
May we never see th
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
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?
Your monitor is staring at you.
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.
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?
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...