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Few days later went back up to #7 on Y! and back to #4 on MSN a day or two later, then dropped back down on MSN and after another two days it dropped back to #66 on Y!.
Then for about a week it stayed at it's low position only changing from #66 to #65 on Y.
Yesterday it shot up to #2 on Y! and number 3 on MSN. We're working on it of course but nothing so severe that it should cause a 60/100 position shift.
Why do these two engines seem to correlate so much?
MSN still uses Ink data AFAIK, but they're actively spidering. Who knows what their beta is using? ;)
Because YST is new (still being refined) and MSN is spidering, I expect their SERPs to diverge a good deal, and soon.
MSN still uses Ink data
Are you saying that Inktomi still exists as a separate entity to Yahoo?
Or that the MSN index is now based on a combination of Ink and MSNbot spidered content?
I thought that MSN was using more or less the same data as Y! but as always, applying their own algorithms, geo-targetting and so on.
Because YST is new (still being refined) and MSN is spidering, I expect their SERPs to diverge a good deal, and soon.
I'm thinking the same thing but I'm not so sure it will be too soon.
I hadn't been paying enough attention (my bad) to MSN (for a LONG time) and wasn't really aware of where/how they were pulling data; so thanks guys for sharing some info.
So what're your best guesses/known facts as far as what percent of MSN's current (not techpreview.search.msn.com) search data is supplied from who/where?
We always did pretty well on MSN building pages for Ink and Optimizing for G and never worried too much. But dropping from the first pages definitely made a noticeable difference in revenue for a site that's still semi-lagged (sandboxed at G).
Greatful for whatever info's shareable but not too worried since the new beta search has us everywhere we want to be across 90% of our sites. That's not to say the results are that great ;-)
but I'm not so sure it will be too soonI'm betting Yahoo gave MSN a year from the time of Ink acquisition (Sept or Oct '03?) to find an alternate data source. AFAIK, MSN is the only remaining Ink customer of significance.
what percent of MSN's current search dataMy GUESS is that free search is 100% Ink. Like you, I haven't paid much attention for several years.
Like you, I haven't paid much attention for several years.
Glad to know there's other in-they-loop types that are out of the loop on this one. :-)
Thanks for the input DaveAtIFG
My GUESS is that free search is 100% InkWhile I don't have a definite answer, I know it isn't all Ink. MSN seems to selectively include urls that have been indexed by Y's free crawler. How they decide which urls make the cut is anyone's guess.
I was also under the impression that MSN had recently pulled all paid advertsing from their SERPs, Ink & Sitematch included. I tried to dig up the thread here, but of course I didn't bookmark it.
I wish I knew how old because certain sites aren't affected (Ours is new). It will be like 18 of top 20 don't move (except to fill in gaps) but two disappear then later or a few days later they reappear.
Presumably this exclusion has been lifted because on August 13th most of my pages appeared in both MSN and Yahoo serps and I now have traffic from both. I assume from this that MSN is still getting its feed from Yahoo.
However although a keyword search brings up my pages in both serps, a www.mydomain.com search displays most of my pages in Yahoo but only 2 in MSN - which is odd.
Are you saying that if a site had a page in the old Ink PFI then the whole site would be excluded when submitting a page 'for free' via the new Yahoo?
I originally had 2 Inktomi PFI pages (out of about 500). When Yahoo took over Inktomi all my Yahoo traffic disappeared except for the 2 Inktomi pages. Even after one page had expired and I cancelled the other I still got no traffic. Slurp visited regularly, so I wasn't banned.
Then suddenly the traffic returned. Personally I think this was a glitch in the Yahoo system which has now been fixed, or at least for me.
I've yet to find any reasons why MSN excludes/includes certain data.
I have a tool that visually compares the 2 SERP's, but when I investigate, I can't find any actual correlations.
Also, the other part is that it's hard to determine how much of their own crawler data is being included into Yahoo's feed. Are they entirely separate databases? Or are they being combined?
I would guess they are entirely separate, but then, how are some added and some removed from MSN"s SERP's?
This would be very helpful to explore.
