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 Of the three
significant search engines today, Yahoo has been around the longest. Unfortunately in this case oldest is not the best.
Yahoo's search engine is in the same ballpark as MSN's, but if I had to choose I'd rate Yahoo the weakest of the 3 Stooges...
"Curly" to Google's "Moe" and MSN's "Larry".
Like MSN, Yahoo has repeatedly had severe technical problems with 301 redirects, listing some URLs that have been redirected
for as many as five years in its results instead of the correct one. This problem also has evidenced itself repeatedly in terms
of the online cardrooms, where
URLs with tracking codes would hijack the cardroom's
organic listing, resulting in this case the cardroom's main page not even appearing for a search for its own name! This
type of hijacking has occurred with all the search engines in other cases too, but for a different, and more sensible reason.
Some years ago most of the cardrooms did not bother to 301 "?" tracking links to the root URL, thus creating thousands
of URLs that showed the same duplicate content (the main page of that cardroom), and the engines would sometimes pick the
"wrong" one of the duplicates to list in the results. Now almost all solve this by 301ing tracking links to their
root URL, so the root URL is always the one picked -- except by Yahoo, as late as 2007 continued to ignore the 301 and list
the tracking URLs separately.
The best aspect of Yahoo's results is also a bit embarrassing -- they hand sort the top ten (or so) of their results,
so that top ten displays good quality, relevant results. They don't always do this but a "poker" search is
one where they do, and have been since at least 2004. This means that while the top ten (or I believe top 15 for a
"poker" search) may not be perfect results, they aren't horrible. All fifteen sites listed are real domains
with merit. Unfortunately they are not able to do this for other poker industry searches, where
some results are just pitiful. Note
on the linked page showing results for a "texas holdem" search, only six of the top fifteen results are even
remotely decent... and of those six, only two really deserve a top 15 ranking, while two others are decent mistakes.
Yahoo has a long way to go, but unfortunately they have been around so long that it is hard to have much hope for the
next couple years at least. |
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