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(essays)-> (Parent)->will static pages help google ? |
submited by Russell Fri 17 Jun 05
Edited Wed 11 Jan 06 |
As I detail here I went to a static page layout that hopefuly will get google to link directly to posts on my site instead of only linking to the topics pages.
not much more than a day lator yahoo crawled the new pages of the site, twice actually. first from the links from the find page (format /static/### ) then from the directoy (format/static/###.php ) both are actually the same page this webserver assumes the ".php" if it is not provided.
so On the June 22 ( less than a week lator) yahoo is already giving links to the static pages
so it would seem, from my perspective, that yahoo has a more current crawl of the web and appears more competant at deep linking. Now don't get me wrong, I love google as much as the next guy, but Its making me wounder if it really is the best seach engine ? Both have decent cacheing of web pages. Both have a "did you mean xxyy" if you misspell something. And google has an irritating knack of finding pages where people have the same problem as I do, but not the solution.
the next few times I have a problem where I normaly just punch in the full text of an error message into google, I am going to try the same action on yahoo. It will be interesting to see the results.
I also suspect that one area where google may have an avantage over yahoo is in contextual simmilarity. ( the example I hear given is that "cullanary " should show up on a search for "cooking" ) In theory I suspect that this could have an advantage. ( if someone uses a different word to describe a the same problem) but it may or may not actually yield better results.
This gets me to thinking. I have Seen some bits about "groupthink" where essentaly the conclusion of a collective group is more accurate than any one person. ( the "ask the audience" move in "who wants to be a millionare" is very relible, the average of all the guesses of how many jellybeans are in a jar is usualy very close to correct. ) Google, as well as all other search engines use this kind of group think to weigh the value of web pages.
A problem is that I might not always want the collective results of all people to weigh aginst the pages that are sujested to me. What if I only want to see pages that are 'sujested' ( by view selection) by people with a simmalar intrest ( say sys-admin problem solvers) Such a tool might be far more accurate.. perhaps not. What is really needed is a way to say "I found the solution here" .. the search engines can gain some incite to wether a user found a solution by time spent lingering on a page, or by continuded searching. ( continuded searching would imply they didn't find it) but it's not a perfect indicator. A web page that contained a dead end that caused you to waist 20 minutes on a fix that didn't work would look the same to a search engine as one that fixed your problem the first try.
I have tried to improve the quality of the notes on this site. Several Places I have added posts that were specifily intended to answer questions I gathered someone was asking when they came to my site. (currently yahoo lists my page on mplayer as the top on that hit, even the static page, but a better answer would be here List of all rpms installed) I have no way of knowing if I was able to answer that searcher's question, as currently nobody has ever taken the time to post or send a "thanks" but I guess I never do that, (except for on mailing lists when an answer is in reply to my specific question) but I would like to think that I am improving things for somebody.
But even if nobody who stumbles across these webpages find them useful, I will have still benifited from the public bookmarking that I use from various locations to keep handy my list of solutions and hacks.
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