From the Associated Press (SF Gate):

In a major expansion, Yahoo Inc. said Monday that its online search engine index now spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images, nearly double the material scanned by rival Google Inc.

Yahoo’s expansion doesn’t necessarily mean it produces more useful results than Google, which has long been considered the Internet’s most comprehensive database.

Given the importance of search relevancy, we subjected the four big search engines to the Independent Sources Keyword Challenge.

Each of the search engines below was given the phrase “Crisis in the Arctic.” The higher the ranking of Independent Sources coverage of the Dano-Canuck stand-off, the more relevant the results are to us. Here is what we found:

• Google  Independent Sources #1 result
• MSN: Independent Sources #1 result
• Yahoo: Independent Sources #7 result
• Ask Jeeves: Independent Sources #1 result

With all of the search engines except Yahoo, Independent Sources was correctly returned as the #1 result.

Despite the fact that Denmark and Canada are squaring off over Hans Island creating a crisis that is unprecedented in that part of the Arctic, Yahoo’s 20+ billion pages didn’t rank this international crisis as high as they did the International Science Initiative in the Russian Arctic (ISIRA). Talk about missing the ball!

We understand that Yahoo is still perfecting their search technology and that it may get better as they continue work on it. Until then, however, we advise people against using Yahoo on topics of critical importance such as the possibility of war breaking out between two northern powerhouses.

Technorati: sem SEO Google Yahoo hans island crisis in the arctic

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 11:23 pm by Insider and is filed under Hans Island, Shameless Self-Promotion, Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.