Wednesday, December 20, 2006

SEM Nightmare - Yahoo Thinks I'm a Typo

UPDATE: Thanks to help from Danny Sullivan getting in touch with Tim Mayer over at Yahoo, this has been fixed.

Here's a recent and strange twist in the ever changing Yahoo landscape, I'm a typo.

That's right, this must've happened just recently too, searching for INCREDIBILL shows results for INCREDIBLE instead of what I actually typed, but I still show up in #10. Those poor folks at Incredibill.com, the billing company, aren't even in the top 100. Now change the search to use quotes and search for "INCREDIBILL" and you get the results that I expected in the first place, and that billing company shows up #6.

I have to ask WTF is up with this shit?

Did I accidentally piss in someone's cornflakes at Yahoo and get a handjob in the search engine to make sure people can't find my tirades that may occasionally point out some flaws in Yahoo?

Maybe they just decided they know best about what you wanted to find regardless of what you typed and decided to give us all a big corporate dose of "WE'RE SMARTER SO FUCK YOU!" with the search results.

Now the SEM implications here are huge as brand names are never dictionary words and Yahoo making assumptions about what you MIGHT want based on the nearest actual word in the dictionary is a potentially nasty turn of events.

Anyone else notice any obviously bizarre results lately for certain searches?

Let's compare notes...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You'll note if you look at the bottom of the page, it says to add a + to the beginning of your search for "exact matches." I don't know if this is recent or not since I rarely use Yahoo, but in my opinion, it's another strike against them. If I make a mistake when searching, that's my fault, and Yahoo shouldn't assume I know how to spell stuff best. They must have an extensive dictionary of brand names, because it never differentiates between the "misspelling" and the brand name. Try "happyness" vs. "+happyness" for an example.