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Get a load of this ...
By Mark Bostrom
We all approach search engines with confidence that
we find what we are looking for, right? Have you
ever been frustrated with your search results on
Google or Yahoo!? I did a search on some of the
pages that I manage for a community directory of
Arlington Heights, Illinois called
Arlingtoncards.com
Stats
showed a big drop in visitors to food-related pages
in October 2005. I checked which pages showed
declining visits and found that Taste-of-Arlington.com
and a Restaurant
Directory Page
were in serious trouble. The restaurant page fell
off the face of the Yahoo! earth as it was
eliminated from their index.
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A Google search result in the same time period had
ridiculous results (see below). A search for the
keywords "arlington
heights illinois taste of
arlington"
(without the quotes) produced the results in the
screen shot below. Ridiculous, huh? No relevant
pages for Arlington Heights restaurants from
Arlingtoncards.com came up in this search ... a
little frustrating for a web designeer.
Then I realized how ridiculous this was for the
searcher, as well. How frustrated a Google searcher
must be when finding a termite page while looking
for information on food and dining. The algorithm
that Google was using that day obviously fell far
short on performance. I don't mean to pick on
Google, especially since Yahoo! took the restaurant
page off of the map -- totally! I was able to find
the Taste-of-Arlington.com page after some 10-plus
search result pages on Google. MSN results showed
two of Arlingtoncards.com pages that linked to
Taste-of-Arlington.com.
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