I answered a thread yesterday about server security and mentioned Bastille Firewall is nice to shore up security on a Linux box. This morning I decided to do a search on MSN, Yahoo!, and Google for the term 'bastille firewall'. The results were a little unsettling. Both MSN and Yahoo! have bastille-linux.org as the top result, which is what I would expect. Google on the other hand doesn't have bastille-linux.org until the seventh page. Has anybody else noticed that G's results seem a little skewed lately? (BTW, MSN UK doesn't even list bastille-linux.org for that term in the top 100.)
I didn't only notice this I also think that's nothing new. Especially when you're searching an up to date topic Yahoo has better results than Google and since MSN introduced their new algo they also have a lot better results than Google. I also see updates on Yahoo and MSN much more often.
Googles results are from the jurassic era. I remember installing Bastille firewall about three years ago i believe it existed before that time but under another name
I have to say I totally disagree. REcently searching for "magazines" on a topic. Tried google, got accurate results. Tried MSN & Yahoo!, their results were totally off topic. I'm for G.
Google had to tweak the 'magic formula' they had used for ages. That particular tweak has gone down in infamy as the "Florida Update". Ever since, Google seems to have drifted off course little by little so it's no real surprise to start hearing about crap results and lack of relevancy in some areas of search. Unless they modify the algo again, expect it to get worse over time.
You can argue relevancy all day long and rightfully so but until Google stops delivering 80% of my SE traffic (when ranked the same in the big three for a given keyword), webmasters and SEO's will still strive to be #1 in Google and the others later. MSN has made inroads but nowhere near the amount I thought they would. Its going to be a long time until Google looses the top spot.
No, not at all. I think they have been drifting away from relevancy ever since. Good way to raise PPC revenues, I suppose.
There is one problem all search engines face... and that is spam. After every new algorithm SEO masters soon figure out a way to get high rankings and frequently have non-relevant pages ranked high. relevant and non-relevant pages to a large extent is a subjective matter. AskJeeves has tried to drill down to the problem by asking questions to the question and drilling down to what you want. Metacrawler does the same. All search engines are not suitable for every search/research your doing. Picking the right engine matters a lot. I do however think search engines should refresh their rankings often even if its a different algorithm throughout the day. Another point - It's not google fault of the webpage of bastille firewall is not optimized
Just watch as MSN and Yahoo start sending more traffic the spammers wil be in on both of them heavily, since at this time they are both easy to rank in.
For our primary real estate phrase google has increased the index from 5 million to over 13 million right now. It seems the relevancy for real estate has got better for some reason. In the past the relevancy rate for our primary real estate phrase was very bad and now there seems to be more real estate agent sites listed in the top 20 than there was in the past.
I would say that Google is the fastest gun in the West as far as "spidering new content" and getting it in the index and have seen this first hand with threads here on DP. Many times they are in Google's index the next day and Yahoo would not have them indexed for weeks.
This isn't a Google relevancy issue. It's a question of either (1) you entering the wrong search term, or (2) you entering a term that the webmasters of that site are not optimizing for. I found it yesterday using the search term Bastille Linux. Lo and behold, there's your site at #1: There are also several other references to the site in the Top 10 results. Go figure, eh? Google actually serves up the most relevant page as #1 based on the title of the page, the page optimization, and the correct name of the product.
It's definitely a subjective matter. I think most of the serps from G are off the mark. When pages that have a k/w in the text once or twice come up before pages that have the k/w in header tags, the file name and/or noticeably sprinkled throughout the text, there is something wrong. For example, this is back in '96; I was selling antique, collectible traffic signals. I had done a great deal of work to optimize the pages for the terms 'traffic signals' and 'traffic lights'. Now granted, this was back in the old days, but I had achieved very high rankings with the work I invested. Then, low and behold, some page describing some church, God knows where, came up ahead of mine when all the page contained was a sentance that was something like "turn right at the traffic light". This seems to be where G is now. Bringing up pages that, when judging the content, do not seem to be nearly as relevant as some of the lower serp results. This is where the frustration comes from.
This is because that site likely had more/quality backlinks coming in to it. This is what I have seen with Google... You could optimagimofomasize the living crap out of your site, but if someone else has more/qualtiy bl's it will knock you down every time.
That's very true. Odd that MSN and Yahoo! would even consider giving me relevant answers to my query. Damn them and their intuition!
For me here in the Netherlands, Google is still over 90% of my se traffic. Both Yahoo and MSN are nowhere to be found, even though I tried to "help them" many times. Perhaps they dislike "alien" sites, non-profit sites, religious sites or philosophical literature?
The point is, given the title of the page, correct name of the product, the search terms on the page, and even the URL, in this case MSN and Yahoo did NOT give you relevant answers -- or at least the answer given by Google was MORE relevant. That's like saying, "I typed in Apple Computers and the Microsoft website wasn't even on page 1 -- what the hell is wrong with Google?". The first rule of computing has always been "garbage in, garbage out".
The question we should be asking is why this page did not come up in Google, not going back and fourth as to who is correct here. Could it be on page factors that Google is not reading on this site