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InsideGoogle
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
 
Does Paid Inclusion Take Away Yahoo's Credibility?
In the search business, credibility is everything. Google took over the search world based every bit on the fact that when you saw their search results, you knew they were "clean", specifically unlike Yahoo's. Yahoo's paid inclusion service lost all it's credibility when Google entered the scene, so much so that they were forced to use Google's results alongside their paid results, just to get any traffic. Now Yahoo has its own search engine, which according to most proffessionals is still young, but is technologically on a good level to compete with Google. However, Web Stractions is calling Yahoo's credibility into question. Yahoo still has two ways of indexing your site: either through a standard web crawl on its "Slurp" spider, or good old paid inclusion. Web Stractions says that barely more than one percent of pages on Gonzo forums that were crawled, made it into Yahoo's index. If Yahoo is giving serious penalties and making its site unfriendly to those who don't pay them, Yahoo won't expect to see an upswing in traffic. A few more stories like this one, and the pendulum will swing away from them, and back in Google's direction. Bad move Yahoo. From Yahoo's website:
When Yahoo! Slurp crawls pages from your site, the pages are not instantly put into the Yahoo! search index. Once crawled, the documents will be considered for inclusion at the next database update. Pages that are indexed will be able to be seen at the conclusion of the update process.

Either you index the web or you don't. If users are convinced you don't, you lose all the gains you spent millions of dollars on. Good luck winning the search wars without trust.
(via Search Engine Lowdown)

Comments:
Hey Nathan. I just want to clarify that the 1% you cited was just for that one month. A couple more of those crawled pages have made it into the index since that original article ... so it is more like 1.0008% or there about. ;-)

We are showing a ratio of about one Yahoo to three Google right now. How they managed that many, I do not know. Most of those showed up almost instantly right after they went on their own -- and that was during the time when nobody saw Slurp at all. It is still a mystery where those pages actually originated from because they certainly did not come from Slurp.

Now that Slurp is crawling like a bat out of hell -- I am wondering why? They do nothing with these pages but throw them in some back room.
 
I think the main thing is that paid inclusion is a bad idea. If Yahoo wants to push some sites to the top because they pay money or give them some flashy placement, fine. But the most important thing is that your search engine has all the pages, and if Yahoo isn't indexing as many as possible, it isn't ever going to get the confidence Google has.

Dodger, thanks for stopping by! I should have visited your site before. I'm adding it to my Blogroll.
 
I agree with your assessment. But I am leaning to giving them the benefit of the doubt a little. Their "best of breed" philosophy on combining the technologies of the SE's they gobbled up seems to be a little broken right now. I am leaning more toward lack of resources to accomplish their task right now, but hopefully they will get it together soon.

I also added you to my list. ;-)

And damn -- blogger is slow as a slug lately.
 
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