Google vs Yahoo
May 3, 2006
Yesterday I decided that it was time for some ego-surfing and hence searched for my name on both Google and Yahoo, to see some really interesting results.
1. Yahoo gives just 3 pages whereas Google turns up 7 pages.
2. Yahoo shows this blog as the first result and Google does not show this blog link on any of the 7 pages; somewhere on the 5th page google throws up sripathikamath.wordpress.com, with a missing 's' 
3. All except one (theres one by some b sripathi kamath) of the yahoo results are pointing to my activites on the net whereas on Google, half the results on page 2 do not have the term "Sripathi Kamath". Except one, no other result from page 3-7 on Google has anything to do with me.
One more point that came to my notice is that, Google does point to a couple of my posts which I had written in the early days of this blog before this blog became inactive in December last year. But none of the recent new posts of the Madikeri Trip turns up in the search results, whereas a search for the term – madikeri trip – on yahoo, points to this blog on page 1. Wonder whether google stops crawling a webpage once it finds it inactive for a long time?
Update: Google results have totally changed. Now this blog is listed first, there are only two pages of results and all but the last one is about my activities. The last one of course is sripathikamath.wordpress.com.
Entry Filed under: Technology. .
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1.
Rk | May 6, 2006 at 2:02 pm
The most famous search engine throws up irrelevant results !! But irony is no one will stop using the google. That is how to win in business…all you have to do is to arrive in bigway and then stay put, need not perform well
Btw another moral of the story is : dont take blogging breaks
2.
Sripathi | May 10, 2006 at 9:56 am
I don’t agree by the fact the “you need not perform well”.. if google keeps throwing up such results over a period of time, I think people will move onto other search engines. It will take quiet a while, but I am sure over a period of time any business will lose its customers if they don’t maintain the performance.
3.
Rk | May 10, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Update::
How did the result change ? Did they read your post ? Did they read your ultimatum that people would quit the service ?
Oh well…I dont think performing well is required. Being there first is more important. Not many sit and compare the results like you. For many, search engine is google , fullstop. Just like how you dont prefer to change from yahoomail to gmail
4.
Sripathi | May 11, 2006 at 9:32 am
Even I wonder how the results changed. Its totally different from what it was just a week back.
And regarding the non-performance issue, I still stand by my word. Maybe I didn’t change from yahoo to gmail, but many did. I am happy with the current yahoo features, considering that I really don’t use it as much as my office mail, which of course is the easiest to use. But when I switched over to yahoo beta, I was terribly disappointed with the “in the face” ads that they have.
And regarding people not changing, wonder how many are still using hotmail considering that it came before yahoo and gmail?
5.
Sanket | May 13, 2006 at 11:42 am
The results do keep on changing. And I don’t think Google is not performing well. If anything, it’s only as bad as Y!, or as good as it. In fact, generic search engines seem to be reaching a er.. (first?) stage of saturation.
6.
Sripathi | May 13, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Ya, I agree that the results do keep changing.But whatever be the reason, I did not expect results as bad as they were when I posted this blog. But now I can’t get those results back to prove my point
I mean this blog link was not found on any of the 7 pages and now this is the first result. Its as if google had never crawled the page after I went inactive in December and suddenly over the last weekend, they have crawled through all the recent posts and updated themselves!
7.
sarathy | May 29, 2006 at 5:28 pm
The fact that the Google has become default search engine cannot be denied. It impresses with the quantity of results it’s search engine provides. Anyways, nobody would go to check hundreds, thousands, lakhs and millions of the pages shown in the result.
8.
Sripathi | May 29, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Yup, I agree that Google does impress with the quantity of results it throws. I was just wondering whether they even maintain high quality
9.
Ganesh | June 11, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Google has a separate search for blogs. Try doing the same experiment with google blog search. It will turn up better result. I am not sure whether Yahoo has a separate blog search engine.
10.
Archana | September 20, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Hey .. I beleive the google engine works on rating the pages on the basis of the number of hits, which partially explains the behaviour.