ACZoom  ·  Archive-2016

Given rare, unique words on a web page, one would expect search engines could easily determine the top sites to list for the keywords.

My interest led me to these keywords: "aczoom home page".

Google search, MSN search, Ask Jeeves search, all list my home page as the first or second item in the search results. They also list other aczoom pages in their results, and adding more keywords can find links to key pages at my site.

Here's a picture of the Google results in January 2006.

Yahoo search results are strange - they do not list a single page hosted at aczoom.com for the above search! They do list numerous pages that link to aczoom.com, but not a single direct aczoom.com page is listed.

[Well, one page is listed, but that area is supposed to be off-limits to search engines, I guess robots.txt does not work as it is supposed to work.]

Here's a picture of the Yahoo results in January 2006.

I have mostly used Google for my searches, but recently got intrigued with the issue search engines have with handling redirects, and I use Drupal, so started checking out how search engines behaved. My conclusion is that if Yahoo can't get this simple query right, it diminishes my confidence in the credibilily of their search results. This is also technically interesting - how is Yahoo building their list, that would result in this situation?

I did try to help them along, submitted aczoom.com manually to Yahoo, but that was a while ago. Shouldn't have had to do that anyway - they have so many pages that link to aczoom.com, would that not lead them to spider aczoom.com itself?

Not sure what all this means, but I can imagine why people have fun trying to figure out how search engines work...