Comments on: Fiddling with Results?

By: Brian Turner

Brian Turner — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 13:35:17 +0000

Aw, come on – let the search guys have their moments of fun.

I’m sure that Google, MSN, and Yahoo! staff are like pro-wrestlers – in public, there’s posturing a-plenty, mean snarling, and direct competition; in private, all sipping Martini’s together and discussing the latest football scores.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 17:48:19 +0000

Tweak the results ranking a bit further:

more evil than satan {popl=100} {mtch=50} {frsh=50}

and Search Engine Watch is up to number 2 and Microsoft to number 3. Earlier on today, Microsoft was number 1 for these settings!

The SEW page has its cache dated today, so no two day lag between crawling and updated the index - not for some pages anyway!

By: Jason Dowdell

Jason Dowdell — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 17:19:22 +0000

Andrew, let me know if you need another gmail invite. I’ll even give you a non-Yahoo email address so it’s not filtered;)

By: Boris Mann

Boris Mann — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 16:24:20 +0000

No, it's not hand-tweaked. I've been doing some searches that return my site when searching on Google.

A search for "canadian voip" returns Google as the #1 hit. I know that I and others have linked to Google searches, especially with title tags of "Google Search for Canadian VoIP", so that may help explain it.

There are a handful of other searches where Google is either the #1 hit or somewhere in the top 10. Ouch...

By: Andrew Goodman

Andrew Goodman — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:42:10 +0000

BTW, just tried the same query but using MSN's personalization options as follows:

more evil than satan {frsh=16} {popl=100} {mtch=0}

The Google home page is nowhere to be found, likely indicating that the result showing Google at #1 is indeed hand-tweaked.

By: Andrew Goodman

Andrew Goodman — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:37:22 +0000

It is somewhat disturbing — you wonder when these guys will grow up. But certainly one is not surprised when these companies engage in forms of hyper-competitive behavior. Just try getting a GMail invite through to someone’s Yahoo Mail address. What? It *somehow* got filtered?

By: Jason Dowdell

Jason Dowdell — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:31:25 +0000

It’s funny that downloadfirefox dot com and google dot com don’t seem to fit in with all the other “evil” related search results on msft’s new engine. I put together a couple other interesting queries with screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Obviously (hopefully it’s obvious) I took a sarcastic approach on my blog but it’s all in fun. I mean they’re in beta right now anyway, right?

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:08:44 +0000

Yes, didn’t mean to suggest that Google actually rigged the results way back then. In fact, their explanation at that time was the same as they do today when various link bombs go off — the search is “reflecting the web.” It’s also not clear if MSN has actually rigged its results or not.

By: sergio

sergio — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:58:21 +0000

I guess that the habit of linking to Google’s search results using the keywords as anchor text is the reason for that, not deliberate fiddling.

By: H Lim

H Lim — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 08:35:23 +0000

FYI, result #4 of the “more evil than satan” query is http://www.microsoft.com. (So MSN Search can’t be all that bad!)