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Now, that speed in indexing is good - but adding the backlink is pretty special. I remember the old days of "riding the fresh wave" in Google before the Sandbox where the indexing speed was great, but they have always regarded the backlink feature as a spam-webmaster feature to be obscured.
Stupid really, but this really impresses me. A blogger has learnt that to see who is linking to them they need to go to Yahoo (not Google obviously because the link command is crippled, and also not Technorati who specialise in this sort of thing). I know a lot of people insult Yahoo for spam (search positions above mine) but I wonder whether it may still be a major player in the future. While Google spends all of it's time removing any new websites from it's ranking, maybe Yahoo is sneaking up.
It seems to me that they are actually converging as Google eliminate vast quantities of websites from their index (sandbox, big daddy, canonical errors, supplemental hell, spam destruction with innocent guys taken out in the mix - etc etc) the end result becomes the same - Google no longer reflects the content on the web as so many important or valid websites are either no longer indexed or demoted. By that token Yahoo, MSN, Ask struggle to index deeply or (in the past) fresh enough - but that is clearly changing.
From my experience both Yahoo and MSN are getting better at indexing deeper content as long as it is well linked - if it isn't then there is a longer waiting period. BUT! If Google slams you in the sandbox yet indexes you completely from day one then that amounts to the same thing!
Correctly indexing websites is the key to being able to then rank and then reflect the web - and give the user choices. The better that Yahoo gets at the crawl, index, ranking cycle - then the better the results will become (the more data you have the more experience you have with dealing with the technology, after all we have all been talking about the flaws with page rank).
At the end of the day, Yahoo are playing catch up - big time - but it only takes someone like them to increase crawl rate and depth, get the results into the index faster, provide acceptable top 10 results for users (and webmasters - as that is the key vote as we have seen with the recent big daddy episode) and then you have a viable product. I think quite a lot of webmasters right now would take some spam on the first page of Google's results just to see their site being indexed apart from the home page and ranking back where it used to at number 8!
Iguana - Yahoo is a contender, no doubt. If anyone can make a short term run at Google it's Y!
As much as I'd love to believe this, it just doesn't seem feasible. Not because Google are good, but because Yahoo are so poor.
I agree with the comments about indexing in Yahoo, I find it roughly 3-4 times quicker than Google. And I have a sitemap for Google!
But this is not enough on its own. I find some Yahoo results better, but also find myself wading through far more commercial stuff that seems very out of place.
That said, I have noticed the quiet changes in Yahoo in terms of crawling and indexing. The comments above are spot on about Google, even if you are not sandboxed or in some ageing filter hell, you have a host of technical issues completely beyond your control to contend with. Although this doesn't automatically mean Google are about to be killed off, it does mean there is a huge amount of resentment simmering away under the surface with webmasters. It is this, the feeling that Google are playing games with people's live websites, that Yahoo ought to exploit.
It will take a lot do this, but I believe predictable crawl patterns, and swift indexing of new data could do a great deal to curry favor with webmasters. Yahoo really ought to start being a bit more pushy in terms of PR. In the aftermath of Big Daddy, and its many failures, many are beginning to wonder how much of Googles business is really just hype. There's is a great deal of ground to be captured by a big SE that can actually do what they promise to do, and not annoy people with monolithic updates (that increasingly are beginning to look like a marketing ploy designed to create interest, rather than a genuine attempt to fix technical issues).
