Yahoo vs Google

July 4, 2006 2:55 PM

Why is it that the Yahoo index of MetaFilter is better than that of Google? I know that when the search box was switched over to Yahoo no one really knew. Any new ideas?
posted by grouse to MetaFilter-Related at 2:55 PM (18 comments total)

Oh wow, look, a tumbleweed!
posted by grouse at 3:12 PM on July 4, 2006

I linked to this search bot experiment in an FPP a little while ago, which suggests Yahoo crawls a lot more. So could be just that Yahoo indexes more, more indiscriminately.
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:14 PM on July 4, 2006

A wizard did it.
posted by Gator at 3:15 PM on July 4, 2006

Or it could just be the results of algorithmic quirks; there's a shit load of web out there, maybe no one engine can serve it all.
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:17 PM on July 4, 2006

Maybe Yahoo! is better.

[ducks]
posted by scarabic at 3:34 PM on July 4, 2006

Science!
posted by justgary at 4:02 PM on July 4, 2006

Yahoo! has a better Al Gore rhythm.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:17 PM on July 4, 2006

One engine to serve them all, One engine to find them,
One engine to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

[sorry, MetaMonkey inspired]
posted by D.C. at 5:24 PM on July 4, 2006

Yahoo! has made serious gains lately. There was a Thingy a while ago that let you put in search terms, and gave you results in three frames from Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo, in random order, with consistent formatting, and then asked you to choose which one gave you the best results. I was about 4:2:1 for Yahoo, Google, and MSN respectively.
posted by mendel at 7:44 PM on July 4, 2006

Yahoo! has made serious gains lately.

Yahoo's index of Mefi has been better than Google's for a long time, so recent gains aren't the answer.
posted by mediareport at 7:54 PM on July 4, 2006

Yahoo Search has long had great technology marred by an outdated company-wide marketing/design team who insist on burying it under the yahoo.com domain instead of making it a first-class citizen like google.com. Add to that a long-standing public perception of the fat Yahoo homepage portal and the end result is no one really knows about Yahoo Search. The best thing Yahoo could do is to create a new verb-able domain name for Yahoo Search ("searchy"? "yahfind"? "yaya"?) and re-launch it as a nifty hip property like Flickr or Upcoming.
posted by todbot at 9:00 PM on July 4, 2006

JFGI? No..

Yahoo! That Bitch
posted by kcm at 9:03 PM on July 4, 2006

There was a Thingy a while ago that let you put in search terms, and gave you results in three frames from Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo, in random order, with consistent formatting, and then asked you to choose which one gave you the best results. I was about 4:2:1 for Yahoo, Google, and MSN respectively.

I would love to see this.
posted by scarabic at 9:55 PM on July 4, 2006

scarabic, I think it's this, results here. Though it doesn't seem to work anymore, and the results seem to be broken somewhat.
posted by MetaMonkey at 10:16 PM on July 4, 2006

I would be totally down with the "Yahoo! That Bitch!" campaign, if I wasn't so afraid that I would somehow say it as "Yahoo that, Bitch!"
posted by MrZero at 5:11 AM on July 5, 2006

It's not even really a search quality question. The typical metric used to compare search engines is whether the relevant search results are at the top of the list. That's not the problem here; it's that Google isn't crawling the whole site, so the results are missing some pages entirely. This is pretty unacceptable for a site that's relatively small and has pages that are linked together like MeFi.

As for why, maybe Matt could look into the Google Sitemaps thing. For some reason, you don't actually have to submit a sitemap to use it. It will show when the last crawl was done and whether they ran into errors.
posted by smackfu at 6:30 AM on July 5, 2006

This is pretty unacceptable for a site that's relatively small and has pages that are linked together like MeFi.

I agree, they should be doing better. Has anyone actually asked Google about this?
posted by teleskiving at 9:34 AM on July 5, 2006

I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall that although Google folks tend to show up in some discussions here critical of Google, no Google folks have ever weighed in on this issue, even though it's come up many, many, many times.
posted by mediareport at 3:50 PM on July 5, 2006