Making Search More Useful
from the slowly...-slowly dept
I've been ignoring the thousands upon thousands of stories about Yahoo dropping Google as their underlying search technology, because, let's face it, this was a surprise to absolutely no one. We all knew it was happening, it was just a question of when. But, to read some of the articles about it, you'd think that this came completely out of the blue, rather than over a period of about a year when Yahoo bought up all of Google's major competitors and publicly stated they would drop Google. However, the much more interesting element of "the switch" is that it becomes clear that Yahoo is trying to do something more with search, and go beyond what Google is offering. I have no real comments on the quality of Yahoo search, other than running a few tests which suggest it isn't up to Google-level quality yet, but it's intriguing that they're clearly trying to tie search more directly to their other properties. The first evidence of this is their decision to include RSS feeds in the results, along with the option of pulling that feed into your "My Yahoo!" page. I doubt most people will use this (or necessarily understand it), but it is a very interesting move. They're basically realizing that there's more to search than just returning a results page. I'm assuming they'll be going even further with this, and it should be interesting to see how Google responds.
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Is Google Getting Worse?
There are some common search terms that people use when looking for my site. Over the past two years the site has always been in the top 5 results on Google for those terms. Suddenly now the site does not appear at all, at least not in the first hundred or so results. Now the only way to find the site in Google is to type the exact name of the site, in quotes.
I think that Google has gone to such great lengths to prevent people from gaming the results that they have really mucked up their catalog. My site is not a commercial site and I have not done anything on purpose to try to lift my ranking, but it appears to have been dropped from their listings.
The result is that I find myself not trusting Google as I once did. Seeing what happened to my site makes me wonder what other sites are not appearing when I do a search.
(When I search for my site with the new Yahoo, it is listed second.)
I think Google better do their IPO as soon as possible and get the money now, while they're on top.
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