Does Yahoo Search Do Blogger Better Than Google?

I have been observing something interesting over the past few weeks. Yahoo does a better job of finding Blogger sites than Google search. The best way to show this is by example.

We have a second blog on Blogger called Laguna Beat. This blog centers around Laguna Beach and observations of this photographer. Last December I started putting images up on the Picasa web site which is a Google site for storing and showing off your images. I guess it's another Flickr. Anyway I have a post at the Laguna Beat blog that explaines where the images are located and which ones you want to download depending on the dimensions of your monitor. The title of the post is Screensaver/Desktop Background. I also use the Tags: Desktop Background, Laguna Beach, and Screensaver.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Do two web searches. One at Yahoo and the other at Google. Use the seach phrase backgrounds desktop starbucks. Laguna Beat will show up on the first page of the Yahoo search and nowhere on the Google search. Why? We have no idea. Laguna Beat is a Blogger site which everyone knows is Google not Yahoo. Yet Yahoo will see the tags we used and other words that match the search criteria. Starbucks was mentioned in a couple of Laguna Beat posts and there is a tag Starbucks listed. Yahoo web search finds this tag Google doesn't.

In all the referrals from a Yahoo web search we find that our use of tags was the difference in a high search result. We have yet to see tags used by Google to find anything.

Now for the weird. Do an image search at both sites. Yahoo finds no Laguna Beat pages and Google image search will - maybe if you go deep enough into the search results.

Referrals from Google are usually the result of the searcher doing a image search and going to the 10th or greater page in the results.

Adsense Makes No Sense

Adsense is another Google something. This week we received a card in the mail with a PIN number for our Adsense account. They instructed you to go to your account and input the PIN. We go to Adsense and put in our username and password and the response is there is no Adsense account under that username. Really? We get their e-mail newsletter and now the card with the PIN number but there is no account. We send a scripted help request to Adsense and they send an e-mail instructing us to do EXACTLY what we were doing in the first place. So we just said no and removed Adsense from our blogs. Can't be bothered with this shit.

The Bright Spot With Blogger

Does all this weirdness with Goggle products mean we will give up on Blogger? No. It's free and relatively easy to use. Not that easy but what is? Remember no matter what product you use they're all desgned by geeky programers and not by people experienced in useability. I mean look at the the edit window we use to create a post at Blogger. It's TINY. But it's free.

One other advantage to Blogger is the ability to have your own name in the URL. An example is Laguna Beat. If you look at the URL address in your browser it saids http://www.lagunabeat.com/ and not lagunabeat.blogspot.com. The blogspot address will still work but it's cool seeing your own URL in the address.

Oh My It's Worse Than We Thought

Update: February 9, 2008

We didn't know that Google had a blog search that was a seperate search engine. So we decided to test it. We did a search for Laguna Beach. Now you would think that a blog (LagunaBeat) that had Laguna in it's URL name, that used the tag Laguna Beach in every posting, and used the alternate text Laguna Beach with every photo posted would get at least one hit. Well I'm here to tell you it got ZERO hits. Nothing. Nada. ZIP.

Will someone, who can get through to the pin-heads at google, please have them explain this weirdness to me.