Forum Moderators: open
When I search for [SPY] in google, I get a onebox result that is for the S&P Index Traded Fund on Yahoo Finance, which I then proceed to click on and check my stocks.
When I search in Yahoo, I get news results for the CIA, etc.
SPY has an average trading volume of 67,318,900 - it's a big stock symbol. Seems to be the same for a bunch of major ETF's.
What are your pet peeves about Y?
Lets keep this to specifics, I don't want to hear "yahoo search sux" or "it's not relevant". Go ruin someone else's thread for that junk.
They need to go for 101 training on customer assistance and appropriate response times.
Every occasion i've had to need to get in touch with them they've been beyond brutal. Almost like a case of "we're Yahoo and we'll get back to you when we feel like it."
Other than that its a great site with lots to like.
Actually, my Y! vertical creep argument doesn't hold much water. If you do a search for just about any very competitive term and compare Y and G side by side it's very hard to tell them apart in terms of presentation. But that's a whole different topic.
MSN and G have already figured out we like this.
2. The lack of response when trying to update site descriptions.
EW
Like when it goes into local search mode when that really isn't what you want. Try searching for Brett's new office location [maps.google.com]. I just can't stand that danged split screen. And sure, G apparently didn't understand what I wanted, but why assume I wanted tourist-related info? And how the heck do I get rid of the map pins? Even if I wanted to look around a bit I really can't with these suckers in the way.
That's it. Quitting time.
I'll also second the directory titles instead of page titles issue. Maddening. Page titles are almost invariably more complete and informative.
The time between significant updates. Staleness.
Their ongoing inability to pick the right pages from sites they index, for a given SERP set. They seem to take the "grenades and horseshoes" approach to picking the right page ... though I have seen some improvement recently. :/
All that said, I do in fact now split my searches in what I'd guess is the following order, most used to least used:
Y
G
M
A
A year ago it was:
G
Y
More and more, I choose the SE depending upon the nature of the search.
As a user: mainly that their serps suck. It's like they're trying to distinguish themselves from google by saying "Look at how different our results are...and, btw, how seriously non-relevant our search results are as well.
As a website publisher: their directory has all the charm of swallowing rat poison. You can lose a significant amount of yahoo search rankings by PAYING to get into their directory. Tell me that that's not weird and twisted. Fortunately, even though I lost good positions in yahoo, I didn't lose any traffic, which said a lot.
As a carrier of contextual ads: they've had a beta for their ad program out for months and the targetting is still absolutely horrible.
It's almost like they're relying on a set of user intent signals/filters to understand a query and when they don't fit the query Yahoo then defaults to showing the .gov nonesense.
:)
