Seeing very different yahoo rankings from different comps ?

[DiscoStu]

I've never really paid much attention to yahoo, I just focused on Google and considered Yahoo traffic a nice bonus. But now I've been seeing big improvements in our yahoo rankings and a big difference in the traffic we're getting so naturally I'm a bit more interested now...

One thing that's confusing is that checking rankings on yahoo will give results all over the place when done from different browsers/computers. I'm logged out when I'm doing this, but I thought personalized search was mainly a Google thing? The results vary from double listing in second place, to single listing at the bottom of the first page to no listing at all. Checking rankings manually in yahoo seems even more unreliable than checking them in Google!

Is this the norm for yahoo? What are they basing this off of? I rarely use yahoo search so they can't have much personalized data on me...

[willis1480]

YAHOO, GOOGLE, and sure others use cookies to save search information...to better display results for "you".

[DiscoStu]

Yes but the results I'm getting from Yahoo varies MUCH more than it does for Google. And since I hardly use yahoo for searching that means whatever they're looking at must have a big impact on the SERPS - more so than Google. For instance, searching for "scuba diving" in IE and FF gives very different results - and I've never searched on anything remotely close to scuba diving on yahoo. So what are they basing these changes on?

Google looks at what websites you click on after your search and uses that as a signal for what you are really looking for...but even with extensive search history the results are mostly similar. When I search for "scuba diving" on yahoo, only FOUR results on the first page are the same in FF as in IE! How could it be this different with so little data to go on?