Robert_Charlton - 5:46 am on Aug 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

John - Interesting that you've used this particular search, because it's a search that I've frequently used as a test search for Google (with the full spelling, not the abbreviation, and with a different city. I didn't tack company onto the end). IMO, Google's results are significantly better than they used to be on this search.

It used to be that the search was significantly skewed by the presence of sites belonging to trusted organizations, companies, and institutions with cityname in their name (and thus in their inbound anchor text).

Just the mention of "public relations" on the home page of such a site was enough to put it ahead of many cityname public relations companies.

Partially, this was due to what I perceived to be a flaw in Google's algo.

In part, though, when I looked more closely, I saw that it was also due to the emphasis on graphics over text in the PR field. It appears that both Google and the PR companies have gotten smarter.

So, granted that Google has had to go through some byzantine efforts to combat spam, and risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater at every turn... nevertheless, on this one search, anyway, it looks like the baby has survived. That may not be true in Sydney.

My feeling has always been that while Yahoo often looks like it satisfies queries better than Google does, or at least more literally, when you look at the results more carefully you see that Google does have a better perception of page and link quality. I can get a local site up to the top in Yahoo much more easily than I can in Google.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:47 am (utc) on Aug. 5, 2008]