MSN Vs Yahoo search engine.

We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine.
Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.

Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo’s market share is Google’s market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay.
As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it’s not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It’s just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story.
Wall street Journal reports
“The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world’s largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html

Bloomberg reports
“Microsoft’s share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing’s first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0

We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google.

Can rel="canonical" index my hostname and not my IP address?

a small question from sweden, anders ask-

will the new canonical tag help with issues where you by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname?

I had the double check that there is the certain things you would like to be able to do it , you would like to take your IP address and put that in to the hostname. neither i am thinking allowed, we make the IP address different from the host name so we have the confirment but we dont think it would hurt to go ahead and have that. And i think that there is certain things when you dont want your IP address to show up, you want your host or domain name to show up instead. So i think that would be a nice thing to do, i m not sure whether we supported

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

question from tripstar, ontario canada –

underscores vs hyphens in URLS, does it make a difference? my-page vs. my_page?

it doe make a difference, i would go with dashes or hyphens if you can, if you have underscores an things are working fine for you.—- using an underscore is a separate and reason y we typically never talk about the stuff in future is that it gives us the freedom to change your mind infact the people who work in there project worked on a something slightly different for scoring in the URL that has high impact in the much higher event. we might still get reminder for thanks for paying as it focus on the quality trh team hey can we take a fresh look at this. but for time being dashes and hyphens are treated as separate from underscores. that might change in the future but that the way it is now.

Yahoo June 2009 search engine ranking update:

Yahoo updated its search engine index on 2nd of June. I can see a lot of shuffling happening most of our rankings got boosted. This is the 1st update in June 2009 I am happy to see yahoo keeping upto expectations.

Bing replaces Microsoft Live search:

At last Microsoft has come up with a search engine which I feel can be a serious competitor for Google. Results are just amazing from the past 6 years I am with search engines this is the first time MSN has come up with somewhat clean results. It just looks amazing I really appreciate Microsoft for bringing this product.
I just some searches for our websites as well as our client websites and almost all of them are doing well and the results are very similar to Google. There are some areas that needs to be cleaned especially the geo-targeting is too uneasy. I can see a lot of .au domains poping up when I search from India. This is natural when geo targeting exists and I see it visibly. Overall results are far better than MSN live results and I am sure there is some future for Bing search engine. I can see there might be some bugs in search results but its perfectly acceptable since the search engine is very new. Google was terrible when it came out especially with all the spammers ready to exploit Google was bad when it came out but it improved and proved to be a really worthy search engine today. I am sure Bing will one day remove the monopoly of Google in search engine industry. I personally like Google but their decision making is becoming too aggressive and I see lots of innocent sites getting affected due to this aggression. I hope Bing stops this aggression of Google.

Does Google’s crawler active on one day compared to another day?

There are few people who report Google is indexing pages more on weekdays than weekends, also it seems Google’s traffic in much more in first 3 weekdays than towards weekends or Fridays.
I do agree with the traffic point its obvious that weekdays are much more popular than weekends. People tend to use computers more on weekdays especially from work places. We monitor a lot of websites and the pattern remains the same.

But for pages indexed I don’t buy the argument. If you see more pages indexed on some weekdays it could just be a coincidence. What I have seen when Google indexes pages it keeps them in its index for a long time. So when a page is indexed on say Monday it will still remain on Saturday. So the numbers should virtually remain same as of Monday. But from what I have seen, sometimes lot of crawling happens on weekends and sometimes it happens on weekdays. I don’t see much difference; I think it has to be mostly with the person who operates the crawlers.

Google’s influence on Yahoo

Those of us who were in search engine optimization for many years know once yahoo results were completely powered by Google. Google used to have almost 90% market share excluding only MSN and its powered search engines. Where are we now today do we still see any relationships with Google. We recently had a major controversy where Yahoo had a deal with Google to display adwords ads in its search results. But Microsoft was not happy with it.
First we had yahoo make a deal with Google
“Yahoo said it had agreed to let Google put search ads on its site in what it called an $800 million annual revenue opportunity that would boost cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first 12 months.
Yahoo’s ads and Google’s would be pitted against each other in an auction style process that could make a deal easier to pass regulatory approval.
“Yahoo is being a reseller of Google whenever it makes sense and that is likely to be a lot of the time given how much more effective Google Web search ads have proven to be,” Global Crown Capital analyst Martin Pyykkonen said.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1247863820080612?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Then Google decided to dump yahoo and the rift began:
“The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it had told Google it planned to file a lawsuit to block the deal, under which Google would have placed its more lucrative ads on Yahoo searches.
“Had the companies implemented their arrangement, Yahoo’s competition likely would have been blunted immediately with respect to the search pages that Yahoo chose to fill with ads sold by Google rather than its own ads,” the government said.
Yahoo regretted Google’s decision, saying it was “disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court.”

Age of search engine crawlers:

From age old days where the search engine crawlers used to take up to a month to crawl a page and can take another 15 to 30 days to re-crawl the page things have changed a lot. Now search engine crawlers are the best compared to previous years. Lot has changed with search engine crawlers. Due to ever evolving algorithms and new features added to crawlers they tend to crawl a website much easier and faster than ever before.

Way back in 2001 search engine crawlers were not so sophisticated. Most of the crawlers including Googlebot take a lot of time to crawl a page and more time to refresh the data. It slowly evolved over the years and today we have Googlebot picking up pages of millions of websites in minutes sometimes in seconds. Features like RSS, XML feeds atom feeds help Google track blogs and other relevant sites and they crawl the pages as soon as the new pages are live on the blogs. It’s not just blogs Google at times have capabilities to detect changes to a website and if a webpage is added search engines are good enough to detect the new page and crawl it.
I call this the age of Crawlers because they just amaze me with their speed and effectiveness. Imagine millions of WebPages are updated every day but Googlebot is able to detect and spider them immediately. I wonder what the future will be for search engines I don’t see any more improvement to be made lets wait and see.

Google suggest one of the find of Google i would say is ever evolving

When first Google introduced it as a beta version everyone liked it and later Google moved suggest option to Google.com regular search. One thing was lagging but. Google was not showing suggestions after we do a search on Google.com homepage. Once you navigate from the page and into results page the suggestion stops. I personally wanted suggest to work both in homepage as well as results page. Now Google has made the changes and it works in both versions now.

Similarly now Google has introduced personalized search which gets saved into web history as preferred suggestions. All the searches you previously made when logged into Google will show up first before the regular suggestions. They also now provide the ability to remove the personalized search keywords which is cool I would say.

Also direct links now appear if you are looking for a specific site. Google’s intelligent algorithm understands your motive to find a website based on your partial keyword input and will show you the correct URL of the site you might want to reach.

Google never missed out commercializing Google suggest. They also have suggestions for sponsored links after all they need to impress their share holders right?

Google webmaster tools new features:

Highlights

• One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
• More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and click through! In addition, we’ve substantially improved data quality in this area.
• Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
• Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
• Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
• Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we’ve streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
• Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we’re providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
• Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We’re always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.

Webmaster tools has now many new features, when you sign into webmaster tools you will see a new home for your site with a message center, and all the sites that you have. To reach a verified site there a one stop dashboard this gives you all the highlights from the data. You can now get your favorite features easily, more navigation and trouble shoot problems can be seen, additionally you can now see more search queries for your site that appears in better than never before. You have robots.txt and URLs in access for some time. But now all tools are together at last under one tab. We already sent messages to your site to webmaster tools Inbox now you can forward those messages to people you know. We all really enjoyed redesigning webmaster tools. This is just a beginning stay tuned for more updates.