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."
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.
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
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.