How does the Yahoo algo differ from Google?

the results are vastly different

[annej]

It seems to me the difference between Yahoo and Google results has increased over time. Can anyone tell me why?

What does Yahoo consider important or unimportant in their algo compared to Google? How about MSN?

[annej]

I thought I'd bump this up. I'm still trying to understand why Yahoo Search results are so different. Someone said that my having done a 301 redirect a while back may have caused the problem. Doesn't Yahoo like them?

[BillyS]

annej -

Yahoo doesn't seem to mind 301s, meaning they will eventually find the right page. That being said, they seem to spider 301s over and over again. It's like they don't care about the directive. For example:

I want to redirect:

www.hompage.tld/somepage

To this:

www.homepage.tld/somepage/

So I use a 301 to handle the redirect. Yahoo will rank the page, however, it doesn't seem to learn about the redirect.

[europeforvisitors]

I think Yahoo gives more weight to huge sites, including huge sites with a lot of subdomains. At least, that's the impression I get when I look at Yahoo SERPs for the terms that interest me.

[annej]

I think Yahoo gives more weight to huge sites

That may be why pages on my smaller site does well on Yahoo for key words that are really unusual but for more common phrases it doesn't do so well.

In the past I did as well on Yahoo as Google and IE so perhaps there was a change in the algo a while back.

It would also explain whey wikipedia does so well in spite of having a great deal of inaccurate information.