Does Yahoo Have Two Different Indexes?

Getting Different Results Depending on computer

[jonrichd]

I made an accidental discovery today that of the three computers I have, one was giving completely different Yahoo results than the two others. Not only were the order of the SERPS different, but the indexes themselves were different, as a site I keep tabs on with two different domains showed up as one domain name in one set of SERPS, and its other domain name in the other set.

This behavior appeared consistently over about fifteen minutes of searching on the three computers. I believe that the one computer was showing different results since at least yesterday, although it may have been longer.

Trying to isolate the problem, I removed the Yahoo cookie from the computer showing different results, restarted the browser, and then it began showing the same results as the other two computers.

Thinking that if I could go back to the original cookie and the different results appeared, I would have definintely found the cause, I tried that. However, for whatever reason, IE refused to recognize the original cookie, and created a new one instead.

Anybody ever see anything like this before?

[steveb]

I don't know about the cookies part, but at least in terms of one of my own domains there are two distinct indexes, with a different number of pages in each. They rotate in and out a few times a day.

[Jimville]

I was talking with a Position Tech person in Chicago (I'm in Texas) yesterday, trying to find out why my PIF urls weren't ranked. He had totally different Yahoo! results. He said this is normal for Yahoo!

[helenp]

yes there seems to be 2 index, how are domains with penalty spidered?
they are in that second index........ searching for name of domain.
which one is the spider that index the pages of the penaltied sites, altavista/scooter, or maybe has something to do with looksmart? Looksmart doesnīt have anything to do with yahoo as I know, but itīs strange, they spidered 1000 pages of my 250 pages in 10 days.......thats a lot spidering.
They surtainley do not spider penaltied sites with their yahoo/slurp spider, though slurp only visits my robots.txt.
Just think strange, that pages I added for about 10 days are in that second Index, but you canīt find it searching for any keywords.

[edited by: helenp at 12:28 am (utc) on Mar. 12, 2004]

[pcgamez]

Could someone translate that last post?

[helenp]

edited, is it better now?