Yahoo is #1 at being #2

Posted by Greg on January 12th, 2006

I will admit up front that I am one of Yahoo’s bigger fans. I root for them because I think they are close enough to getting it. (in terms of search) Strong competition among a handful of top players combined with evenly distributed market share is a search marketer’s wet dream.

But everytime I start feeling like they are gaining some ground, I stumble upon crap like this.

Clustering multiple results from the same domain was probably the very first improvement ever made to algorithmic search engines back in 1996. Now, all of a sudded, 10 years later, Yahoo has forgotten how to cluster results. Yes, I know it is probably just a temporary "testing bug." The same kind of bug that causes the "cache" and "more pages" links to come and go at random.

But how is it that a company like Yahoo decides that it’s ok to let that kind of stuff go live? The only conclusion I can come to is that they have decided their ultimate goal is to be the very best at being #2. Afterall, which requires more work? Producing search results that are clearly better than Google’s, or simply doing enough to stay ahead of MSN, who can’t even find threadwatch.org?

Work

Comments

5 Responses to “ Yahoo is #1 at being #2 ”

  1. Edd on January 12th, 2006 6:15 pm

    Yeah ! i noticed that earlier…
    In fact , i have a crappy site of 50 pages… and
    i don’t know how… there is an specific search that gets all of my 50 pages on the results… and the word is only 1 TIME in my link list… it;’s not even in my title, url or headings…
    The same site is taking the 60%-99% of the results
    of lots of keywords…. it’s weird.. really.

  2. Adam on January 13th, 2006 8:08 pm

    I noticed this the other day when two sites about movies owned by the same people dominated Yahoos top 100 results for a search term on hosting. I actaully emailed Yahoo knowing it wouldn’t make a difference but I had to vent. One of the sites was on page two 8 times! Each page was a review of an asian movie star with a single link to a review of a hosting company in the bottom of the left column.

    I do hope they get it right.

  3. detlev on January 15th, 2006 4:34 pm

    WG,

    Results like these are hard to cluster when they are powered separately. It looks like a directory match plus a natural crawl listing.

    -d

  4. Chris Boggs on January 23rd, 2006 3:27 pm

    Kind of ironic, but notice that Threadwatch is #4 for the search “webguerrilla?”

    I see you must not be in the Y Directory…:P

  5. Chris Boggs on January 24th, 2006 10:13 am

    hey had you seen this article that Rusty pointed out at SERoundtable via Brett at WMW? Certainly supports your idea…

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