Yahoo search vs Google

Have been doing some testing.

[GrantNZ]

After nearly a couple of weeks of testing terms/keywords, I think Yahoo has the edge for relevance and updating its index faster. I think Yahoo search has an up to 66% relevance edge over Google at the moment.

[quotations]

I have been a lot happier with the current Yahoo results.

Before they switched over:

~30-35% Google
~30-35% Yahoo
~30% other (MSN, AOL, AV, etc,)

For a few million impressions in the past couple of days it is now more like:

~55% Yahoo
~20% Google
~15% MSN
~10% other

That seems to imply that results on Yahoo are found to be more relevant than they used to be.

A lot of technical topics where it recently became extremely hard for competent technical people to find useful information on Google are showing up really well on the new Yahoo! Search.

Non technical searches seem to be doing better there as well and the true authority sites do not seem to be getting the kind of shabby treatment they are getting on Google lately.

[seofan]

I totally agree. The change is somewhat intriguing and Yahoo seems to be taking a second breath.

Yahoo has branding and a current loyal base that will grow rapidly and pick up the vacuous void of Google's choice to choose dollars and IPO over a loyal customer base.

The Yahoo search testing that we have done shows 95% support of white hat optimization techniques. The change from "directory" is glowing well on Yahoo.

A group of professionals and I have tested over 100 sites comparing results. Hands down - Yahoo wins. Not because they are our clients, not because it is "Yahoo", not because we want it to.

We would rather the much touted Google live up to their reputation that has attracted so many users over the years. It will be very painful over the next 6 months for us to explain over and over what is taking place; particularly to clients that are trusting us 100% to manage their search engine marketing and have no real knowledge of search engine events.

We are pleased with the Yahoo interpretation of relevancy is reflecting the intentions of the majority of site owners and ethical search engine marketers. We do not intend to deceive - we intend to promote what is correct.

[GrantNZ]

I noted that Google made some quite obvious changes to its index when Yahoo relaunched its search on 18 Feb.

Tracking the big three, now:

Yahoo 52%
Google 37% (and this includes our Adwords referrals!)
Msn 11%

[cbpayne]

There seems to be 2 parallel threads going on at once re this. Comnparison of stats between SE's is relatively meaningless unless some information is given re relative rankings in those SE's - off course Yahoo traffic will be up if your Google rankings are down. That has nothing to do with searchers giving up on Google and going to Yahoo.

[quotations]

It is not google rankings being down but Yahoo rankings being way up.

The rankings on Yahoo are better than the pre-Florida google ranks for the highly technical search terms that technical people use to find the authority sites.

That makes them much, much better than current post Florida, post Austin, post Brandy results.

Google traffic is about the same level it was at.

Yahoo! traffic has gone way up.

User satisfaction has increased substantially in the technical forums and discussion groups for those terms.

[Imaster]

I have noticed that the Yahoo results are much much more relevant than current Google serps. Just the other day I needed to do some research online and as usual I took the help of Google. But I was thoroughly dissapointed, all I could get was affiliate sites which were involved in selling the product I was researching.

I searched the same phrase on Yahoo, and BAM!, excellent results with articles on the topic I was researching.

Google definitely needs to improve its results if it wants to efficiently fight against Yahoo (and possibly MSN).

[europeforvisitors]

For those who measure relevancy by referrals, I'll mention that--in raw numbers--I've seen a 45% increase in Google referrals over the past three months, compared to a 35% increase from Yahoo and a 45% drop from MSN. This is for a well-established editorial travel site with about 4,000 pages of static HTML content.

If we make the questionable assumption that referral trends are the result of audience behavior caused by SERP relevancy, we'd have to say that--for my site, at least--Google is still delivering better results than Yahoo's and MSN is mostly serving up trash. :-)

[pcgamez]

I have posted a quick thing on Y v G for dynamic content.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[allanp73]

At the beginning of this thread, it was mentioned that Yahoo indexes more often. I still do not find this to be the case. Google is faster about updating and indexing. I have many sites newly listed in Yahoo that basically only show for their url. Not enough of them has been indexed so that they can rank well/at all for niche terms. Google still filters but for niche terms new sites have a hope. I feel that Yahoo is better because of its relevence compared to the current Google (which still hasn't completely gone back to pre-florida results). I notice that Yahoo now incorporates many of the features I liked about Google: cache pages, spelling corrections, etc.
After four years where Google was my homepage, it has been dethroned by Yahoo, my new home.

[cbpayne]

it was mentioned that Yahoo indexes more often

I missed that comment. According to Yahoo's own webmaster guidelines, they update every 2-4 weeks. As Google is updating data on a continuous basis, I am not sure how that conclusion can be made.

[newwebster]

As far as speed is concerned, I think that the Yahoo and Google are about equal. I launched a site last week and put a link from the home page of a well spidered site by all bots. Google picked up the new site within 12 hours, Yahoo picked it up in 24. There new slurp bot is pretty close to the speed of the Google fresh bot. Niether one has done a deep crawl yet.

[CCowboy]

What's the old saying?

If It's Not Broke... Don't Fix It!

Someone forgot to tell Google!

I think Yahoo results are currently better than Google. Their algo seems to be simular to were Google was 6 months ago.

It only stands to reason Yahoo would go that direction.

[percentages]

>I think Yahoo results are currently better than Google. Their algo seems to be simular to were Google was 6 months ago.

How time passes so quickly......Yahoo results are almost identical to those displayed at Google in late 2002, they were the best Google results ever displayed, and now Yahoo has them, and Google doesn't.

KISS.....Google used to know what it meant and it made Google popular, now Yahoo has "stolen" the principle and Google has ditched it......HUGE MISTAKE!

[GrantNZ]

With our site, we (surprisely) found that Yahoo were updating our new sub-pages faster than Google. For sub-pages, about One day for Yahoo to index, about Ten days for Google to do the same.

I'm guessing that Yahoo have put more resources in to crawling.

Better to have a smaller index of recently crawled pages/sites than a larger index of out of date material?

[Tim]

CB Payne,
We actually update the index daily with millions of newly discovered documents through our new Fast crawler. We also update all newly discovered documents as well as changed documents twice weekly through our main crawl system.

[cbpayne]

Sorry Tim, I will take that back. But your webmaster guidelines do say "Yahoo! Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds new content for indexing." - I took this to mean you update every 2-4 weeks.

[mikeD]

How time passes so quickly......Yahoo results are almost identical to those displayed at Google in late 2002, they were the best Google results ever displayed, and now Yahoo has them, and Google doesn't.

I do agree that the results at Google in 2002 were pretty good. Only problem I am finding is some sites just don't seem to be included in the Yahoo index. Haven't a clue why, because these are high ranking sites in Google. Seems odd they don't appear in Yahoo.

[seindal]

Maybe Y! has some really old google data from late 2002 in their index :-) I have sites with some really old pages index in Y!, pages I have taken down ages ago.

[Tim]

Seindal,
Can you send these pages to [e-mail] so we can diagnose the problem.
Thanks,
Tim

[excell]

I'm also noticing a lot of stale pages and new sites that may have links from sites that are already indexed not getting picked up.

Wondering if the new Yahoo will have the capacity to follow links and index new sites/pages in a similar manner to the speed of Google soon?

Just seems like old results.

[excell]

sorry all, I am not following quickly enough.. It seems Tim answers my question here [webmasterworld.com]. (still, it seems slow to me ;) )

Edit-fixing link.

[walkman]

"Can you send these pages to [e-mail] so we can diagnose the problem"

Hi Tim,
I sent an e-mail too. No WW id or anything because I wasn't sure.

My .net pages are still in despite having a 301 redirect for months and at one point having the .net disabled. The .com is out of the Y! index I believe because of this. I hope someone can tell Slurp to come by my .com and hang out for a while. Everyday I make fresh coffee and leave candy out :), no luck so far. I'm hurting. 30+% of my traffic came from Y!, now after the switch it's about 1%-2%. To make matter worse, I felt confident enough to quit my day job.

I still get referrals from those few .net pages but sadly they can't be served because of the 301. Slurp visit both of them at least 2X a day to get the robots.txt.

Thanks for listening to our suggestions. That's indication #1 that Y! is serious in winning the search engine wars. We got selfish reasons too, but some of our suggestions make sense.

Thanks again,

[newwebster]

"I do agree that the results at Google in 2002 were pretty good. Only problem I am finding is some sites just don't seem to be included in the Yahoo index. Haven't a clue why, because these are high ranking sites in Google. Seems odd they don't appear in Yahoo."

These sites may have one or more .php links pointing to their site. Yahoo currently can not handle these types of file links. Their slurp bot is following these links and making it the landing page URL for those links. Thus, Yahoo can not figure out which is the home page and I am guessing that all standard links pointing to the original URL on not credited.
Yahoo is aware of this and I hope they fix it soon because it has effected my site as well.

[seofan]

So - Yahoo is not yet dynamic content oriented?

[2_much]

At this point it seems Yahoo is more "static html pages" oriented, but they can handle dyanmic, just not as well. To get dynamic pages properly indexed and refreshed it may be a good idea to pay under the URL inclusion program.

[pcgamez]

I am having no problem getting dynamic PHP pages listed in Yahoo, but I am having huge problems with Google.

[seofan]

I certainly hope that Yahoo takes into consideration the development choice of webmasters that are compiling information for customers.

By far, all of the developers that I have worked with over the past 8 years have embraced .php with open arms and use it exclusively. It is a very efficient form of development - so I hope they are aware of the importance of incorperating .php into the spider capabilities asap.