Observations 2

Clifinar – Observations on the search engines indexing – part 2

As I promised in the first Clifinar observation I continue to follow the way the search engines Google, Yahoo and Windows live index new content on the internet.

This is the 10th day follow up of the clifinar competition indexing:

On the 10th day into the clifinar compucall seo competition I have searched for the term “clifinar” in Google, Yahoo and Live and made screen shots of the results:
Google clifinar results
Yahoo clifinar results
Live clifinar results

Findings:

It appears that the search results have become more or less stable in the past few days thus making the process of changing the results order more difficult and interesting.

Clifinar and Google:

Google’s clifinar results are stable. With one article, 2 blogs, squidoo and hub pages in the top results, it is easy to see that Google is definitely going for content. Because we can only write content in web 2.0 sites and blogs that’s what Google indexed. However, Google also indexed articles and gave them good positions on the page – especially since there are not many sites with enough content.

Clifinar and Yahoo:

Yahoo is still indexing a mixed content that includes mostly social sites such as Digg, wetpaint and similar. It is however finally showing also 2 articles in the bottom of the first results page.

Clifinar and Live:

In the previous clifinar observations article I found that: “while Google and Yahoo have positioned real content at the top of the clifinar search results, Live was still showing as it’s top search result for clifinar a comment made in a blog’s guestbook”.

5 days later and Live is still far behind Yahoo and Google on the quality of the clifinar results it shows. There are no articles in the top 10 results which are made up of 6 different sites, 2 of them with a double entry and 1 with 4 results (2 on the 4th and 5th positions and 2 on the 7th and 8th ones).

I don’t know what the indexing algorythm is like in Live but it looks like it’s not as relevant as Yahoo and Google.

Conclusions:

Although in the first 5 days into the compucall clifinar seo competition, Google was the only one that indexed articles in it’s first clifinar results page, by the middle of the 10th day Yahoo managed to catch up and also indexed articles in the top 10 clifinar results. Live did not show any articles in the top 10 clifinar search results.

I think that Yahoo has intentionally given more weight to social sites in it’s search results and considering that Yahoo is doing all it can to try and position itself as a social site it makes sense.

I can’t understand why the Live results look like they do. The new search engine that replaced MSN should have been better at indexing relevant content, however I couldn’t see that it did so with any degree of success. Not  over the other 2 big search engines any way.

Over all, Out of the 3 search engines mentioned Google had the best mix of articles, blogs and social media sites with Yahoo following close behind. Live…well, like I said…sorry…