Flashes of Panic

I was looking at site traffic statistics this morning and discovered that at least one site I have a hand in gets more search traffic from Yahoo! than Google.

How did that happen?

This particular company launched a website in the late ’90s on an ISP account without their own domain. The site was tricky to maintain, and for various reasons it stagnated. More recently, we set up another site, with the same design and largely the same content but easier for a non-technical person to update, and on its own domain. This site includes a lot of more search-friendly features, including an XML site map (seems silly when you only have five pages, but there it is.)

The ISP, however, won’t close or redirect the old site, even though it hasn’t been paid for it for years. We can’t redirect it, and it still comes up first in Google searches, and it’s not going anywhere. The new site has slowly battled its way up to eighth. (N.B. Because the company name uses a deliberately archaic spelling, there’s not a whole lot of competition for the significant keywords.) On Yahoo!, the old site is also first—but the new site is third. In other words, in my opinion, Yahoo! is returning better results. But Google’s stranglehold over English-speaking search results makes our job a lot harder. And search drives a tremendous amount of web traffic; more than half, for most sites.

After thinking about this for a minute, I went up to the search box on Firefox and switched the search engine to Yahoo!. I feel like this is important not just because of our site, but for perspective.

Search results are a view of the Internet. It’s easy to convince yourself they’re the only view, the same way you can convince yourself that the view from your back door is the only way to see your yard. But clearly they’re not. And if everyone sees the same search results, it’s the same as if everyone reads the same newspaper… or if you tried looking at everything from one eye. You still see stuff, but you don’t see depth, and you can’t judge distance. (Try driving with a hand over one eye. On second thought, don’t.)

Using one search engine is like looking at the world with one eye. (And using one meta-search engine isn’t much better.) We should be changing those search settings periodically, like farmers rotating crops. There’s nothing wrong with Google—but it’s not always right, either, and if we never look anywhere else, we might forget that.

Now Playing: Released from Winter Pays For Summer by Glen Phillips

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