Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Yahoo indexing deeper than Google?

Wow. I've just been reading on The Shifted Librarian that Yahoo no longer uses Google as its search engine (this one's been coming for a while, of course). Jenny mentioned a cool feature in Yahoo - some search results will display an RSS feed, with an 'add to My Yahoo' link.

That's all good, and I took advantage of it by adding The Shifted Librarian to My Yahoo (though why I bother seeing as I use Bloglines anyway).

So I decided to test-drive Google vs Yahoo, see where the differences are. Being somewhat self-obsessed, I started by Googling (Yahooing?) my own name. Google gives a fairly reasonable set of results - there's a snowboarder, a session musician, and a partner in a major accounting firm who share my name, and they're all near the top - I get a few hits for this blog and a few other mentions on the web.

I switch to Yahoo. Valisblog is the number 1 hit. So high that I don't even notice it's there ;-). What's really weird is at number 6 - a result from my old junior soccer club, that I played for aged 9-12. It's a page out of their database that describes my career at the club, which teams I played for, who my teammates were. Out of a database. I don't get that. How can Yahoo get that deep into the DB that it pulls my name out - at #6 no less? (I mean, there are at least that many webpages that have my name on them on the front page). Also interesting is the #14 entry, which is me again, from a mailing list I subscribe to.

I'm going to be very interested to see what the search engine experts have to say about this one. As it is, Yahoo and Google seem to be covering significantly different ground - at least in as far as New Zealand librarians are concerned ;)

| posted by Simon at 8:14 pm