OT - Search engine question

Go to Yahoo and type in "Iowa City Airport".

The first choice that comes up is "Eastern Iowa Airport" -- the Cedar
Rapids, IA airport!

How do they *do* that? It doesn't appear to be a paid advertisement, since
it appears along with the rest of the search results.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy, since it seems to be a deliberate -- and
annoyingly successful -- attempt to "spoof" the search engine. Why doesn't
the Iowa City Airport come up first?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

In article gbgUe.319519$_o.176759@attbi_s71, Jay Honeck
wrote:

Go to Yahoo and type in "Iowa City Airport".

The first choice that comes up is "Eastern Iowa Airport" -- the Cedar
Rapids, IA airport!

How do they *do* that?

Well, for starters, Eastern Iowa Airport has an official web site, with
airport-related content on the top-level page. Iowa City doesn't, at
least that I can find. The fact that your airport's "page" is a
subsidiary of Iowa City's main page will drive down its search ranking
relative to Cedar Rapids.

It also has commercial traffic, meaning there are probably more web
pages that link TO it, which will also push its ranking up in many
search engines.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy, since it seems to be a deliberate -- and
annoyingly successful -- attempt to "spoof" the search engine. Why doesn't
the Iowa City Airport come up first?

See above. This may also be of interest:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearc...basics-14.html

--
Garner R. Miller
ATP/CFII/MEI
Clifton Park, NY =USA=

First Jay stop using Yahoo. It sucks compared to Google. Second in this case
Google does the same thing. Both use a very complex system of click throughs
and other metrics to rank pages. But it is my understanding that as far as
Google is concerned the biggest factor is pages with the search term that
has links from other pages.

If you Google "Iowa City Airport" in quotes so it is looking for the phrase
not the words your page comes up first.


"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:gbgUe.319519$_o.176759@attbi_s71...
Go to Yahoo and type in "Iowa City Airport".

The first choice that comes up is "Eastern Iowa Airport" -- the Cedar
Rapids, IA airport!

How do they *do* that? It doesn't appear to be a paid advertisement,
since it appears along with the rest of the search results.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy, since it seems to be a deliberate --
and annoyingly successful -- attempt to "spoof" the search engine. Why
doesn't the Iowa City Airport come up first?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

One main reason is that the actual name of the airport is "Iowa City
Municipal Airport". Of course, you have to use the phrase "Iowa City
Muni Airport" to get the right hit. If you don't use the quotes to make
a phrase, you basically get various combinations of the individual words.

--- Jay


--
__!__
Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.OceanCityAirport.com
http://www.oc-Adolfos.com

Gig 601XL Builder wr.giacona@coxDOTnet wrote:
First Jay stop using Yahoo. It sucks compared to Google. Second in this case
Google does the same thing. Both use a very complex system of click throughs
and other metrics to rank pages. But it is my understanding that as far as
Google is concerned the biggest factor is pages with the search term that
has links from other pages.

I don't know... I've compared the results of yahoo and google searches on
a number of occasions and almost always get basically the same results.

--- Jay



--
__!__
Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.OceanCityAirport.com
http://www.oc-Adolfos.com

SlashDot had a thread a few weeks back talking about a study done comparing
the two and Google won pretty handily. My personal problem with Yahoo is
their portal page though. It is almost painful to look at. Google's is so
nice and clean.


"Jay Masino" wrote in message
...
Gig 601XL Builder wr.giacona@coxDOTnet wrote:
First Jay stop using Yahoo. It sucks compared to Google. Second in this
case
Google does the same thing. Both use a very complex system of click
throughs
and other metrics to rank pages. But it is my understanding that as far
as
Google is concerned the biggest factor is pages with the search term that
has links from other pages.

I don't know... I've compared the results of yahoo and google searches on
a number of occasions and almost always get basically the same results.

--- Jay



--
__!__
Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.OceanCityAirport.com
http://www.oc-Adolfos.com

I recently gave up on Yahoo. About ten times the last week I used it, I
started typing in my search string, only to have Yahoo decide to select
everything I had typed in, and over-write it with the last few letters.

I also got sick of clicking on a news story, only to be brought to another
page with two sentences on it, and the rest advertising. Now I have to click
on the headline again to read wht whole story.

I looked for a 'feedback' link to let them know why I changed my home page,
but couldn't find one.

"Gig 601XL Builder" wr.giacona@coxDOTnet wrote in message
news:3FiUe.40197$7f5.25959@okepread01...
SlashDot had a thread a few weeks back talking about a study done
comparing
the two and Google won pretty handily. My personal problem with Yahoo is
their portal page though. It is almost painful to look at. Google's is so
nice and clean.


"Jay Masino" wrote in message
...
Gig 601XL Builder wr.giacona@coxDOTnet wrote:
First Jay stop using Yahoo. It sucks compared to Google. Second in this
case
Google does the same thing. Both use a very complex system of click
throughs
and other metrics to rank pages. But it is my understanding that as far
as
Google is concerned the biggest factor is pages with the search term
that
has links from other pages.

I don't know... I've compared the results of yahoo and google searches
on
a number of occasions and almost always get basically the same results.

--- Jay



--
__!__
Jay and Teresa Masino ___(_)___
http://www2.ari.net/jmasino ! ! !
http://www.OceanCityAirport.com
http://www.oc-Adolfos.com

Jay Honeck wrote:
Go to Yahoo and type in "Iowa City Airport".

The first choice that comes up is "Eastern Iowa Airport" -- the Cedar
Rapids, IA airport!

How do they *do* that? It doesn't appear to be a paid advertisement, since
it appears along with the rest of the search results.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy, since it seems to be a deliberate -- and
annoyingly successful -- attempt to "spoof" the search engine. Why doesn't
the Iowa City Airport come up first?

Well, Yahoo *is* paid in different amounts by subscribers, and you can see that
Eastern Iowa Airport has paid to subscribe (note the "category" tag). That's why
they're at the top of the results list despite having nothing to do with the search.

Try Ask Jeeves or Google instead. As a searcher, you will be better pleased with
the performance. As a businessman, you can only make persistent use of the word
"google" and hope everyone takes the hint.

George Patterson
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to
use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.

Jay Masino wrote:

If you don't use the quotes to make
a phrase, you basically get various combinations of the individual words.

With Yahoo, that seems to be what's happening even if you do use quotes. The
Eastern Iowa Airport site doesn't contain the phrase "iowa city" anywhere, even
in the source. In fact, it doesn't contain the word "city" at all. In the old
days, using the plus sign immediately before a word would block any page that
did not contain that word. It seems that this is not true with Yahoo.

George Patterson
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to
use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.

"Jay Honeck" writes:

Go to Yahoo and type in "Iowa City Airport".

The first choice that comes up is "Eastern Iowa Airport" -- the Cedar
Rapids, IA airport!

How do they *do* that? It doesn't appear to be a paid advertisement, since
it appears along with the rest of the search results.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy, since it seems to be a deliberate -- and
annoyingly successful -- attempt to "spoof" the search engine. Why doesn't
the Iowa City Airport come up first?

Yeah, it's annoying when funny things come up first. Why, on Google,
the first link I get searching for "Iowa City Airport" is from some
darned *motel*! :-)

Went back and tried the Yahoo search, and I can't see any signs of
"spoofing". I think the problem really is that Yahoo isn't paying
enough attention to the location of the words relative to each other
on the page -- noting that the sequence "Iowa City" doesn't appear in
the source for that page *at all*! I can't see any legit reason for
it to rank so high for that query. I haven't been following Yahoo
search engine carefully, but I think all the majors (Google, Yahoo,
and MSN are what I mean by that at the moment) carefully separate
advertising hits from real hits; I don't think there's any way to "pay
for placement" of real search results on any of the major ones.

Most of the claims about "search engine optimization" magic are
untrue. There aren't ways to do many of the things unscrupulous
practitioners claim to be able to do -- and getting caught trying can
sometimes get you permanently downrated on Google, which is a pretty
severe punishment. And the search engines are understandably somewhat
tight-fisted with information about how their systems work. And they
change little details pretty often.
--
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