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But then there are other popular searches where the first or second position is occupied by thin content MFA sites, or non-relevant .gov/.edu sites. Yuck.
Is it good enough to be good enough?
What bugs you about Yahoo Search and how would you suggest that it be fixed?
Hopefully they can turn it around.
They have the spam issues of the past well under control - MSN for one could learn a lot from yahoo!
The three / four string search terms could perhaps be fine tunned a bit more but for two word search i think they give google a good run for their money.
This last update improved the quality again and they took out a lot of dross, long gone now are the sub-sub-sub-sub domains, doorways etc, Yahoo is on the up imo.
Some here should look at the Cr@p msn are currently churning out (not to mention the backwards use of out of date dmoz descriptions for sites) and the constant big daddy, little daddy data centre messing about from Google before they knock Yahoo.
Im not saying Yahoos perfect but lets face it the other two are not exactly 100% either are they.
Rich
I have not believed those numbers in years. I believe what I see in my logs, and like tedster, the difference I see for same queries with same ranking is easily 5x in google's favor.
Targeting top Yahoo serps is easy, but its not worth the time spent for the dismal traffic.
Yahoo's philosophy is to limit control and to exploit this lack of knowledge by packaging as much low quality traffic with normal traffic to boost what is a non-existant growth rate. Evidence of this: Yahoo's Advanced Match rule change in '05 - that allows broader search queries to match more precise keywords.
Continuing down this route will turn Yahoo Search into Findwhat, er Miva...
If I search G for my main short KW, up come some good pages, some so-so and a few junkers.
The same search on Yahoo is such a random mixture of junk I can't understand it.
Its as if Y takes their first 1000 pages for that KW, and randomly selects 10 for page one,
randomly another 10 for page 2 and so on.
In a more targeted search (2 KWs) Yahoo comes back with far better results.
Its the one-word search in Yahoo that leaves me at a loss. -Larry
Interestingly enough, on 6 out of 8 MSN's been giving us more referrals than Yahoo.
Therefore a suggestion to Yahoo!: improve SERPs so people actually start using your search, instead of paying off some "research" company.
Then tell me if its better then Yahoo.com?
Unbiased opinion, search for things other then your own.
If so then my opinion I believe holds weight.
The opinion that they are indeed targeting high dollar keywords and deliberately serving up crap results.
I dont know how to politely say it, buts its damn deliberate, and obvious as hell, and they are losing the main thing that they are supposed to do by doing it. Relevancy!
In order for that to happen, MSN would have to somehow dethrone the popularity of Yahoo itself. People who search via MSN or Yahoo are generally on those sites for other reasons - to read articles, read news, or because their home page (my.yahoo.com) is set there.Only way MSN will dethrone Yahoo is if MSN becomes a more dominate portal than Yahoo - which I truthfully don't see happening (although i've come to like MSN quite a bit, recently).
Jim
You are absolutely right.
If anyone wants to search, they just go directly to Google.
So Who use Yahoo Search?
1) The guys who didnt get an expected answer from Google SERPs.
2) The guys who are already browsing Yahoo Network sites.
MSN search results are very fast like Google. When you search at Yahoo, just keep counting 1..2.3.. until you get the SERPs page. They should work on this. This is my suggestion to Yahoo Team.
Do Y'all think Y is a little too focused on the commercial side of search?
well, 4 sponsored links at the top, 2 at the bottom. I could hardly find my #1 an #2 listings. Looks like natural search is only some kind of by-product there?
nerd
Google remins my first choice, but I've found that Google's results have become a lot more spammy in the last two years. This has caused me to use Yahoo more often.
My only real complaint is the "sponsered link" overkill. I realise that they're in business to make a profit, but they risk putting off the punters - My non-geek friends seem much more aware of the difference between paid and non-paid results than they used to be.
It's hard to spend millions of dollars on something and be categorized as indifferent
You gotta spend money to waste money.
Y in particular seems to include some really old/outdated pages high up in the listings. Some of the time this is a small problem and some of the time it is a big problem. They seem to switch back and forth between newer and older views of the same topic at random intervals. For example, this morning, Y is displaying a page that I removed from my site at least 5 months ago and that I didn't even realize was still on the server until I noticed it in the search results last week!
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:48 pm (utc) on Jan. 17, 2006]
[edit reason] Fixed typos. [/edit]
You spend 50-60 MILLION? A year?
Small business?
Run Yahoo.ca on all Yahoo's (.com etc...)
Start from there, a good base line, and work on from there.
I get the impression that all the chains of command are not talking at Yahoo. I think there are some lower people who really can't figure out whats wrong because the higher ups have done some secretive tweaking, and not kept the lower personel in the loop.
$50-60K a year on YSM
Not million! And 50-60K is quite easy to spend on YSM and Adwords.
Thanks. Yes, 50-60K.
Some days, Yahoo sends up towards 40% of all traffic, others, it's down around 27%, so it's definately a major player for me.
Yahoo still holds a good portion of the US searchers, but fails horribly against Google for foreigners. Perhaps that is one area where they need to work on a little more.
The SERPs taking so long to load may be another reason for the quality issue. Is Google really that much greater? Or is it just quicker to search through the results by pushing the 2, 3, 4 numbers and have the next results pop up right away while Yahoo's take a while. It atleast quadruples the search time to find something on Yahoo.
Google isn't perfect, but they do have the best results at the moment. I, like many others, when researching find myself more and more often having to go to another engine to find what I'm looking for; many times that engine is Yahoo.
Sometimes I find it there, others not. The main issue I see with Yahoo on this, specifically, is the sites they push towards the top for many searches. A site may be an authority, but shouldn't be #1 all the time and hold two or three more positions in the top 10 alone. Take the most relivant page to the search, put it at the top and leave the rest of the site alone. Let other sites have a try.
Another issue seems to be subdomains. They are everywhere and more times than not, irrelevant and spammy.
Something else: I don't like to see search results from other search engines when I am searching on a search engine already! (Google does this too in some cases). It's just odd to me. Why would I be searching for another place to search? (although, many people do search on Google for [google]).
Perhaps, the fault does lie within the formula giving onpage (h1,h2 etc.) too much weight. Many people cry about this on Google how they don't do it enough, but look at Yahoo. They do it and are having problems with it. It's too hard to regulate. Either keep it the way it is and put better spam blockers, or change it and put more relevence within offpage factors.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the internet world moves fast and is changing every second. If Yahoo wants to be a huge player within the next few years, they better change the results quickly (within the next 6 months) or they are the next altavista.
I talk to many webmasters in the industry and i get the feeling at least 50% or more of the Webmasters on this site and small business community has sites, legitimate well made, well designed, clean sites "white hat" that are banned in yahoo or from the old inktomi. for who knows what reason/no reason.
i also feel that Yahoo/search just comes across as arrogant and not-interested in what webmasters feel or think. How common is it for webmasters to get no reply from Yahoo about their sites, or get some canned/auto response? I have written them in the past and got no answer.
constructive advice, i would say to use their directory data/human review process better. If a company is paying for directory listings(which nobody really uses) they better well show up in the serps and not be banned. If someone is human reviewing it for directory submission/payment purposes, if the site appears of quality for x amount of factors and is banned in yahoo search, the ban should be unlifted at that point if there appears no reason for it. You mean i pay x amount every year and i cant find my site when i type it in on yahoo.com?
Webmasters really make the search engine happen and successful, not only building quality business and sites returned as results to searchers, but through word of mouth. We've told our friends, family, business colleagues, and internet neophytes to try google when they are searching for something. I never tell anyone to try yahoo to find something, because half the legtimate sites are banned, and the other half are garbage or obviously hand edited.
they can throw all the webmaster parties they want, and i thank them for every free drink, but im not spending more with them, i've cut back with them the past few months. (thousands per month), and i spend it with google and elsewhere instead. if some of my sites are no where to be found in the yahoo serps/banned and show up well on msn & google, they/yahoo arent getting my advertising funds.
Im with Jimville, he's right on the money and he is not the only YSM customer tired of it. I think if nothing changes in 2006, come WebmasterWorld Vegas next november they will be the #3 search engine (msn moving ahead of them) and the buzz on yahoo will be ya-who, or ya-who-cares. I look forward to spending my ad dollars with Adwords and the new msn Adcenter.
well, 4 sponsored links at the top, 2 at the bottom. I could hardly find my #1 an #2 listings. Looks like natural search is only some kind of by-product there?nerd
i feel yahoo /old inktomi has just banned to many quality websites. Authority websites, sector leaders, established companies, websites businesses care about. To many well known sites are missing in the serps unless the serps are hand edited and then they are there.dclick
SERP / Index is not refreshed frequently enough - Their bot seems to eat ton of data but it doesn't reflect on SERP which is therefore a waste of our bandwidth ...and theirs Yahoo takes forever to get a simple website rightfollowgreg
My sentiments exactly!
Vimes
I've contemplated banning Yahoo from my sites, but have held off since I'm hopeful that someday they will begin to get it right. This thread is not giving much reason to remain very hopeful...
User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 120
One page every two minutes should be enough for them.
In addition...well guys Yahoo is the worst SE - period.
It's not even a search engine, it mostly a directory + a listing of hand picked websites for competitive terms.
There guys can buy as many labs as they want, they can not make it.
I am happy to find hand picked websites, carrefully chosen within businesses willing to pay $299 a year sometimes but this is not a search engine, that's it.
In a way, difficult to justify charging $299 for a directory which provides less traffic than my 15 years old siter's website's guestbook ...
I build my site brandname (equal to domain name), it's an unique name. Many sites link to me.
Please fix it.
If you had one saying "whats Right & Wrong with Google search" on the Google forum or "Whats right and wrong with MSN" on the msn forum im sure it would have just as many disgruntled webmasters including Martin if his own sites didnt rank so well in them.
The point is that Yahoo is NOT Google or MSN - Thank God!
It has a different Algo that in a lot of ways is better than both Google and MSN imo.
Sure, some of the sites we work on dont rank and some do but that doest make Yahoo a poor search engine. In fact i would say its serps have less spam in them than both Google and MSN currently.
Yahoo could do with a greater market share but Google has pole position imo as a result of the google toolbar and the ease to add Google search to a site also Google is the only one of the three that just has a plain search box on the page and not a home page full of junk you dont want when you are interested in search.
The one poster here who thinks older sites should rank over newer for example is pure madness. Yahoo has a sort of sandbox anyway. Currently Google gives far to much weight to older sites - sure once they are over a certain age (say a couple of years) they should feature but to give a site with average content a higher position than a site thats rich in content but is younger is a joke - the end result of this kind of idea is that you end up with first on the net sites ruling the roost. If a good specialist site losses out to a low in content older site just because of its age thats a crime imo.
Yahoo, doesnt do this which is a good thing imo, its serps currently are better than ever.
Also Yahoo has its own directory, edited by its own staff which is unbiased and superb - they should draw more attention to this facility.
In conclusion i think if webmasters are not happy with their positions in the Yahoo SERPS they should work on adding content to feed Yahoo what it needs so that they do rank.
The reality is that unlike Google and MSN, webmasters are currently unsure how the Yahoo algo is ranking sites and hence cant work out easily how to improve their position thats why so many on this thread are moaning.
In Google its plain Age + Backlinks, In MSN its just Spam pages + more spam + Keyword domain name with Yahoo its taking differnent factors into account.
I say spend less time moaning about Yahoo and more time improving the content of your site so that Yahoo likes you. If the Google and MSN were perfect some posters here may have a point but the sad fact is they are not perfect and yahoo is at least as good as the other two if not better in some areas.
Rich
