When Yahoo Search Results Turned Sour

seo-2-0-results-raven-seo-tools.png

SEO 2.0 rankings for the keyphrase [SEO 2.0] during summer 2008, a Raven chart.

In mid 2008 Yahoo updated their Index to offer “more relevant results” which allegedly were “more like Google“. I was amazed to find out that the contrary was the case.

Yahoo Search results turned sour

Usually I don’t complain about search result quality. I rather try to optimize better. Here I wanted to make sure that it’s just Yahoo so I conducted a little test.

I manually tested my rankings in the search results for the keyphrases that my SEO 2.0 blog is undoubtedly or at least very likely most relevant:

  • SEO 2.0
  • Tadeusz Szewczyk
  • Tad Chef
  • onreact

What did I find? On Yahoo, almost nothing, MSN/Windows Live was almost as bad but Yahoo managed to be even worse.

The test yielded one more surprise, Google was not the single most relevant search engine out there. Check out the results:

seo-2-0-rankings-test.png

*onreact.com homepage

I used a proxy server service to mimic a US citizen and not to get personalized or localized results from Germany where I live.

Conclusion:
Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live sucked. Ask and Cuil did not. Sadly both have given up by now.

Last updated April 11th, 2018.