Regional Variations of Yahoo! Search Results

Does Yahoo.com somehow show user specific results?

[erwig]

I am quite confused by various Yahoo! search results.

My site is a .net site, hosted in Canada. I am doing extremely well in yahoo.ca, being #1 for quite a few competitive terms.

The same terms tend to be in the 80-100 range on Yahoo.com.

So far, so good, and it does make sense. Yahoo.ca gives preference to Canadian sites and determines this (at least partially) by the IP address where the site is hosted.

However, I just checked a few other regional Yahoo!s, and I am in the top 10 for those terms in Yahoo! UK and Yahoo! Singapore. Why?

Also, I actually get quite a few referrals from Yahoo.com for those terms, and I wouldn't expect to get much, seeing that I'm below 80 or 90.

It seems like some users may be seeing different search results on Yahoo.com, depending where they are located. Is that possible?

Note: The users who find me at Yahoo.com are mostly not Canadian users. Plus, I'm located in Canada myself and the results I see for my site at Yahoo.com are terrible :(

Any ideas?

Christian

[Garya]

i spoke to Yahoo regarding .com verus .ca
They said they are the same results they just look different.
I showed them the results to prove that .ca was better, there response was no comment.
Its all about $$ in the US and pay perclick.
its a trend for US results on both MSN and Yahoo less relevant results for US search.
check out MSn latin america great results and compare to us same problem.
MSN said that they see better results in the us but on the 10 example I sent then they agree
latin america is better, and they don't know why. Its the same story Google msn and yahoo
are now just conerned about $$ and making beleive they care. Google is the most receptive and responds to inquiries making it look like they care, but they do have the worst results compared to the other 3.
relevant results
1. ask.com
2. google, Yahoo, Msn all equally bad results.
up untill last month I would have put Yahoo #1 and msn #2 ask.com #3 with Google #4
Time for a new search engine

[superclown2]

They all use geotargeting. If you look at the SERPs via proxies in different countries you'll get different results for the same search terms. Y! also seems to use several different algos simultaneously. Many of us here in the UK get better results abroad than we do in our own country - illogical if it's a geotargeting issue, makes sense if it's a different algo.

[Garya]

looks like yahoo is looking more like google with this update tonight. Older sites, outdated. Worst results yet.
all three SE have bad results.
ask.com only one with good results.