Relevancy: Google vs Yahoo

18.05.07

Look at this:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=wordpress%20theme%20writing&sourceid=firefox
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=wordpress+theme+writing&ei=UTF-8&fr=

I mean what the fuck is going on there? Clearly Yahoo’s top few results are the ones I’m after. Sort it out Google.

Remind me again why we’re panding to these people? This wasn’t the first search I ran by the way. After a few different keyword searches in Google (to no avail) I plugged the last one I used into Yahoo and got there straight away.

And you know what? It happens time, and time, and time, and time, and time again. I swear G’s still my default search because they waste so much of my time I don’t have any left to fix my bookmarks.

Yours,

-Pissed Off Rob

16 Comments

  • 1

    That’s why on Dec. 11th, I made the decision to find myself a new default search engine. I ran a test for the rest of that month, and on Dec. 31st, I’d made my decision to switch to Yahoo. I haven’t regretted it since. (you can see the series of posts i did (3) by searching for [default search engine] on my blog. (Don’t want to link drop here). I wish everyone would at least give the other engines a real chance like I did. They might be surprised.

    DazzlinDonna
    http://www.seo-scoop.com

    18th May 2007 @ 12:53

  • 2

    Please, please link drop anything you think deserves a link! That mentality of “well I’m not sure how this link will affect the SEO…” is exactly what we need to get rid of!

    Rob Haswell

    18th May 2007 @ 12:56

  • 3

    Well I was just thinking the same thing. Looking for PC hardware reviews, Google was just serving me price comparators and online merchants crappy pages. Yahoo gave me access in the first results to real reviews.

    Sébastien Billard
    http://s.billard.free.fr/referencement

    18th May 2007 @ 13:23

  • 4

    Yep, same here, noticed it a while ago

    I don’t use Google so often anymore. But I still sometimes search as I used to type “g keywords” in my Opera browser adress bar instead of “y keywords’.

    Vygantas
    http://www.gpf-design.com

    18th May 2007 @ 14:24

  • 5

    Hm, interesting. I will try Yahoo for a change. Thanks for the post, DaveN

    anty
    http://www.anty.at

    18th May 2007 @ 14:37

  • 6

    We pander to them because of their market share.

    Mass appeal =/= quality

    Just look at the music industry in the US if you need proof of that. While I personally have adopted a different search engine for many of my personal searches, I will continue to check clients’ rankings in Google first as long as they’ve got such a massive chunk of the market.

    Marketing Drome
    http://www.marketingdrome.com

    18th May 2007 @ 14:40

  • 7

    Well, there’s http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=create+wordpress+theme

    I consider it a bigger loss thout that Google’s spelling suggestion for ‘panding’ is ‘pending’ instead of ‘pandering’ :(

    Brian White

    18th May 2007 @ 15:32

  • 8

    same here - if you’re searching for a product or a news story, google’s great, but a lot of things along the lines of ‘how to’/coding yahoo seems to do better right now.

    what i’d like is to be able to put my search terms into the firefox quick-search box & hit ‘ctrl+y’ to search yahoo & ‘ctrl+g’ to search google. anyone know how I can put that together?

    daniel
    http://www.omstrategy.com

    18th May 2007 @ 19:34

  • 9

    The thing that puts me off yahoo is all the rubbish on there home page, Its so full of news, weather and everything else its just to busy i like the simplicity of google.

    Ashley Peach
    http://www.dog-toy.co.uk/

    19th May 2007 @ 00:06

  • 10

    Rob Haswell, I can assure you I refrained from link dropping merely to not give the appearance of spamming Dave’s blog. I am in no way worried about how it will affect SEO. But you’re right, we do need to stop thinking so dang much about things like that. Ashley Peach, I almost never search from the search engines’ home pages, but rather from the browser toolbar, so the simplicity or complexity of their pages matter not to me. I, of course, do check Google rankings but I no longer use it for my own personal searching. And frankly, I don’t miss it in the least.

    DazzlinDonna
    http://www.seo-scoop.com

    19th May 2007 @ 02:02

  • 11

    I suppose that you were troublesomely by the results from Google or yahoo.You can have the another choice such as msn.com, microsoft.com and so on.
    However, I also expect that google get some changes.

    Recharge
    http://www.laptopbatterybbs.com/

    19th May 2007 @ 04:10

  • 12

    Hey “Ashley Peach” here is the link for the Yahoo! search engine http://search.yahoo.com/
    We’ll wait to see what will happen when Microsoft buys Y!

    Nabil
    http://www.marocbb.com

    19th May 2007 @ 20:46

  • 13

    Theres only three things I hate about Google and two of them are kind of the same thing

    When I type in my companies name they ask if i meant ‘vapochill’, not sure how much of an authority you have to be for them to realise i dont want vapochill

    When I type ‘Search Engine Opimitsation they ask if i meant Search Engine Optimization, even on google.co.uk

    And theres no search feature in google reader

    Glen
    http://www.viperchill.com

    20th May 2007 @ 18:28

  • 14

    I think google’s search results are less relevant these days to encourage more people to click on the adwords.

    Mike Carter SEO
    http://www.webordead.com

    21st May 2007 @ 11:40

  • 15

    Dave you are wrong, the Yahoo results aren’t really any better just because they include a few theme designers and the Wordpress codex.

    In many ways Google actually gave you better results than Yahoo because sites like Lorelle’s really do contain a lot of under the hood information about Wordpress that you would be hard pressed to find in the Codex.

    What neither search result picked up were the 2 most popular “starting blocks” for creating a Wordpress theme.

    1. Sandbox - a minimalist theme designed to be customized
    2. K2 - a highly complex theme with lots of features, designed for skinning.

    Andy Beard
    http://andybeard.eu/

    22nd May 2007 @ 08:00

  • 16

    Apologies - didn’t spot that you wrote this one Rob

    Andy Beard
    http://andybeard.eu/

    22nd May 2007 @ 08:01

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