Indexing examples

Mike Banks Valentine has an article based on his experience on how spiders behave when indexing. For example he concludes:

1) Google crawls 250 pages on first discovery of links to site. Then they don’t return until they find more links and crawl slowly. Google has failed to index new domain for 60 days.

2) Yahoo looks for errors pages and once they find bad links will crawl them ceaselessly until you tell them to stop it. Then won’t crawl at all for weeks until crawling heavily one day and lightly the next in random fashion.

Even though I don’t agree with it’s conclusions on Google (see this example, the part on Yahoo it’s interesting.

The complete results of his analysis is here . What I see that he ommited is what submission steps he took if any. As far as I know no one will spider your domain out of the blue

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »

Search engines vulnerable to spam

Last night doing some research on the romanian real estate market I almost felt off my chair.
Google,Yahoo, MSN were spammed beyond recognition by a site using the old keyword stuffing technique.
Look for “chirii garsoniere” (translation rent single rooms) and see the results.

Google
Yahoo
Msn

Spammed results are those that include “Delta Dunarii”. What is more curious, all the other organic results seem to be gone.

Aparently the guy used a query like “allinurl: _post.htm” to identify old message boards that allow unmoderated posting. Because those results are from old sites their relevancy in all the search engines is higher.

So…what we have heard lately…big words like “human raters” “personalization” “anti-spam filters”and so on are just cheap PR.

The proof is there that any determined low life spammer can mess with results

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 10 Comments »

Next search frontier: PERSONALIZATION

This week has been a busy week for PR people, journalists and bloggers. Google and Yahoo (and even Amazon’s A9) launched interesting and future will proove how usefull products.

Both Google and Yahoo made a step further in their ranking process and accepted the fact that any alghoritm can be partially replicated. To compete with that they are using the net users as volunteers raters. But the way they approached this is completly different:

Google:

Google’s way is somehow….cloaked. In order to use it you have to login to any Google service and the rest is on automated pilot. This is the G00d thing and the UGLY thing.

• Good: fits well the grandma test. You don’t have to be a power/medium user in order to rip the benefits. Sites you click in results pages are placed higher when you repeat the query. As simple as that
• UGLY. Well here is more. First of all I don’t know how many users will nptice that something has been added. That makes imposibile for them to pause the whole tracking process. Second I’ll tell you my searching bhavior. I use Firefox and when I do a search I open in new tabs all the first ten results and evaluate them. That means that in time I will have the same results on TOP 10 and I will miss fresh content. That is VERY ugly

Yahoo:

Yahoo’s approach is rather geeky. There is no automated process and you will have to manually save the pages you find usefull in a section called MyWeb (this time Yahoo has brought Google’s BETAmania to a higher level; both MyWeb1 and MyWeb2 are in beta….). They have also added tagging functions and social functions by connecting groups of users.

What both Google and Yahoo avoid telling is to mention how those features will affect the “public” results

P.S.

If you want to see a complete summary of this full week check out Guillaume’s coverage

Posted in Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »

Yahoo skinning process

Just noticed that profiles of Yahoo users got a new skin similar to 360.
To see this use http://profiles.yahoo.com/id , where id=yahoo id

Posted in Breaking News, Yahoo | 2 Comments »

Yahoo Dance :)

Yahoo just announced on their blog a new update of their index:

This is our second weather report. We will be making changes to the index tonight so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

Let’s play the “Conspiracy Game” and read between the the lines….
We will see this:

It promises to be hot, humid and rainy down on Bourbon Street

If we are playing the game we will see the threat….but we are not paranoid …aren’t we?

Posted in Breaking News, Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 1 Comment »

Yahoo aims again at Skype

Check this out :

Xten joins the Yahoo! Messenger arsenal: now what? OK, here’s what by ZDNet’s Russell Shaw — Now this is getting real interesting.Late yesterday, Xten Networks, which makes VoIP-enabled softphones, said that Yahoo! has licenced the Xten eyeBeam software development kit to deliver SIP-based VoIP in Yahoo! Messenger.Yahoo! Messenger director (now that sounds like a fun job) Frazier Miller said that the app will be for PC-to-PC calling.Earlier this week if you remember (or even [...]

Well they seem pretty decided to conquer VoIP market.
The only big mistake they can do now is to make a subscription service from the Pc to Pc calls.
That’s the third aquisition this week…..

Posted in General, Yahoo | No Comments »

Yahoo gets serious with VoIP

Eventhough latest IM product is VoIP enabled the quality is not always the best. To compensate this they made another quick move and:

Barely a month after launching its own VoIP enabled IM beta product, the company snapped up DialPad, a VoIP company that sells PC2PC and PC2Phone services to consumers. “What we saw in DialPad was quick way to add PC2Phone and inbound calls,” says Joanna Stevens, Yahoo’s VP of Corporate Communications. Yahoo will integrate Dialpad’s services with its new IM product.

Source

Advancedippipeline asks themselves:

How long until Microsoft and Google react?

I don’t say anything about Microsoft because they have MSN Messenger. But Google…ahem. Err with what to react? With a Hello?

Posted in Breaking News, General, Google, Yahoo | 1 Comment »

Yahoo Browser?

Everyone has heard the rumors on the Gbrowser but no official comments from Google.

Again Yahoo seems to make a step further further than their competitors:

Yahoo Inc., owner of the most-visited Web site, may consider developing its own Internet browser to help attract more users and advertisers toits Web sites, Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel said.

“You could look to Yahoo to do most everything that makes sense on the Internet going forward,” Semel said Friday in an interview in New York. Developing a browser may make sense “at some point in time,” he said.

Source

Corelate that piece of info with:

However, a Yahoo spokesperson told ZDNet Australia on Tuesday( 16 March 2005) that the company would not launch any new products or services in the future without ensuring that they work on both IE and Firefox.

Source

And with the fact that 3 months later:

Yahoo has quietly updated its Instant Messenger software to be fully compatible with Firefox, almost three months after the company pledged to do so.

Source

And you will see on what Yahoo research labs are working and why they love Foxes…errrrrrr Deers

That proves once again how Yahoo has a good and very clear strategy while Google lacks one

Posted in General, Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 2 Comments »

So you want to make a directory?

A good article points out some good rules to make your fresh directory score better in Google

There are no big discoveries in it but a good roadmap for those who want to start one

Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »

Another Google & Yahoo bomb strikes on G. W. Bush

Yooter InterActive has discovered the largest Google Bomb ever. With 130 Million results in Google, Bloggers manage to rank George Bush #1 for the keyword ‘failure’.

Google has decided to rank George Bush as a plain failure, not just a miserable failure… but just a plain old ‘failure‘.

The Search Engines need to match the anchor text with the text onsite or else the ‘Google Bomb’ issue will not go away.

These issues paint not only Google in a bad light, they paint the entire search engine industry in a bad light. As Yahoo is suffering from the same results. MSN is the only other major engine that has yet to reflect those results.

These issues are easy to fix, why won’t Google take the steps necessary to make the search engine experience better for the users? There are nearly 130 million results for the keyword ‘failure’ . This is a far more advanced type of Google Bomb than was was employed last year for the keyword ‘miserable failure’ . With that many results it actually proves a serious flaw in the Search Engine’s algo.

This was discovered by for a few days now by Yooter InterActive Marketing. Yooter has tried in a vain attempt to contact the search engine to fix the issue. Since it was not addressed, we decided to go public with it.

We have listed the details in our blog:
http://www.yooter.com/blog

As far as I know this is the first bomb to affect Yahoo also. To be honest I have never checked on Yahoo the other ones.

Posted in General, Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »