Monday, July 04, 2005

Insignificant experiment with search engines

After experiencing an unannounced downtime in Blogger and being unable to post anything for at least a day I noticed that Google was no longer searching my blogs, they seem to still have at least this one in there index but the Google bots are no longer crawling them.

I was so glad when I first got visitors coming from Google and I couldn't wait for them to deep crawl my blog so they can give to people who are searching better result or just to give me something to brag about on the net. Well, it just didn't happen. I must admit I felt a little bad about it...On the other hand, Yahoo! Search which was also crawling my blog still kept me, they even deep crawled the blog. It's a little scary when you see how often I get hits from Inktomi on the blog –Yahoo! uses Inktomi technology to "search" the web and Inktomi uses Firefox when they stop by at my spot-. Yahoo has already deep crawled both of my blogs for this Blogger profile. Msn search has not yet indexed my blogs -what are they waiting for?-

I tried to search for "marguerite jasmin" with both Yahoo search and Google and Yahoo was the one with the most "relevant" results, by relevant I mean that they are related to no one else then me. Yahoo had my blog and my Blogger profile has first and second results and then they had many of my posts, a few comments I left on other blogs and of course other "irrelevant" results. Google of course has none of my blog and they don't have my blogger profile either only a few of the comments I left on very popular and high profile blogs. For those of you who did not know it, Google owns Blogger. It did seem odd that Yahoo would crawl Blogger more than Google did as if Yahoo took Blogger more seriously than Google did.

My first conclusion is: if I am not searching for something really technical or very specific, using two different search engines might be beneficial because they might actually give you different results. But old habits are hard to get rid of. Google is still my search engine of choice; I only use Yahoo! Search when I'm not satisfied with what I find with Google but if you want to search recent information from blogs it seems Technorati is a better alternative Google results are more likely to be outdated. In the end it all comes down to knowing the best tool to find the specific kind of information you are searching for.

My second conclusion is that you should be careful when you comment on someone's blog especially if it is a high profile one where your comment might be just one among a hundred others because you can always delete something you write on your blog but the odds on having a comment you put on some stranger's blog deleted are very low.

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