As soon as I wrote the previous post, I headed over to Sphinn and submitted it there too. Within 30 seconds of submitting it to Sphinn, my post started showing up on splogs like this one.
30 seconds!! I knew duplicate content and spam blogs were a problem, but at this rate I can see how the search engines have problems deciding which version of the content came first.
October 3rd, 2007
Microsoft.com just tweaked the Live.com search engine relevancy algorithm in an attempt to compete with Google, but instead ended up with what I think are some of the poorest search results out there.
It only takes a few searches to realize that the biggest change Microsoft made was to give a heavy weighing factor to domain names and keywords in URLs.
Let’s take a look: Searching for the term text message Live returns a top result of textmessage.cc – a GoDaddy parking page! That’s right, the most relevant result here is a freaking GoDaddy parking page!! You’ve got to be kidding me.
Looking at another result, viagra we can see that the #3 result here is viagra.name – a thin affiliate site! It’s easy to see that adding a product to your cart on viagra.name just takes you to another site with an affiliate ID.
If we were to run a search for another highly competitive term: payday loan we’ll see that every result returned has the term in the URL. This simply doesn’t happen over on Google where the algorithm returns more reputable loan companies (that have physical locations) as well as the ftc’s website and news results.
Clearly, Microsoft still has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to search.
October 3rd, 2007