Flashes of Panic

Earlier this year I wrote about how I had found Yahoo search producing better results than Google. The inbound link I created in that post seems to have awoken Google to the presence of the newer website, but after I encountered the situation once I’ve been seeing it all over.

It looks like I’m not the only one to notice this situation. Doc’s argument, if I understand it correctly, is this: Google only notices pages when there are recent inbound links to them. This means you’re only likely to find a page if someone else has found it and linked to it recently. (Or, more nefariously, if someone has created a whole bunch of links to something so you would find it.)

This argument gets detailed a little more in the comments:

If I have to do SEO tricks with the content I put online — tricks meant to “increase traffic” and otherwise game a search engine’s ranking algorithms — just to get that content indexed at all by a search engine — then I would say that search engine is corrupted by the external systems built to game it. Or worse, by its own advertising business model.

and

…if Google only catches up when one makes a new post pointing to old posts that Yahoo has seen all along, which is the better search engine?

My experiment using Yahoo as my browser’s search has gone pretty well, incidentally. The only time I’ve been disappointed in it at all has been when someone has told me to find a particular page by searching certain keywords.

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