Random Thoughts

How Much Censoring Does Google Do?

by damonp on July 11, 2007

in Random Thoughts

I was playing with a backlinks checker earlier and stumbled upon some interesting Yahoo and Google link love facts…

Yahoo doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against their rival Google (quickly becoming everyone’s rival). Yahoo lists plenty of backlinks in its search results for google.com. Google isn’t currently returning the favor for yahoo.com. In fact Yahoo shows more backlinks for Google than Google does for itself. Surely Google caps its results.

Try directly at Google with a search like this:
For Yahoo at Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:yahoo.com
0 Pages

For Google itself
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:google.com
1,600,000 Pages.

Or even going to Google’s advanced search page and using their Links search,

Links – Find pages that link to the page

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Try both yahoo.com and google.com there.

Google’s backlinks are known to be only a small percentage of what are actually crawled, but 10% of ZERO is still ZERO. Given the round number 1,600,000, I’d say the results are capped.

Over at Yahoo, the results are quite different.

For Google at Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com
Currently 17,475,629 pages.

For Yahoo at Yahoo
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fyahoo.com
Currently 1,675,687,898 pages. That’s 1.6 billion.

I have always defaulted to Google’s search. Originally because that was all they did. With the Yahoo Directory and all of Yahoo’s other offerings, I assumed years ago that since Google concentrated on search, their tool would be better. Now I’m wondering what I may be missing.

It is every business’ prerogative to do what works best for them. Internet search is becoming a utility though. Millions of people depend on their daily bread for traffic from these utilities. Is there anyone monitoring them?

Popularity: 1%

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Interesting Ecommerce Comparison

by damonp on January 9, 2007

in Ecommerce,Random Thoughts

The “killingest” assumptions businesses make revolve around how their customers buy. Suppose you and 99 other people go into an electronics store and purchase the exact same item. That’s 100 sales. But you can probably guess those 100 sales didn’t unfold in the exact same way. No properly-trained sales person would ever use the exact same language or structure the sale the exact same way for every single customer. And yet, ecommerce sites routinely assume one product page is going to meet the needs of all customers interested in that product. Talk about your huge assumptions!

Source: GrokDotCom

How flexible are your sales processes?

Popularity: 1%

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