Fuddland

Last week Yahoo! officially unveiled their new search engine — previously their results had been powered by Google, but now they have their own spiders crawling the interweb.

Since their algorithms for indexing and ranking are not the same, it’s highly unlikely search results will match precisely across both engines. There’s an interesting tool for comparing the search results called, appropriately enough, “Yahoo! vs Google”: it draws lines connecting identical hits in the first 100 search results for both engines. I’ve invented a game based on this tool: it’s called YaGoogle!™, and there are several objectives.

• Find a search that whose results form a series of vertical lines — that is, the results are ranked exactly the same by both engines at some point [or points]. The more consecutive vertical lines, and the closer the group is to the top of the results, the higher the score.

• Find searches where a sequence of results for one engine are the inverse of the other — for example, result 20 in Google is result 80 in Yahoo!, result 21 is result 79,…, up to result 30 in Google [matching result 70 in Yahoo!]. Maximum points for all 100 results fulfilling this criterion.

• Searches that create interesting geometical patterns with the connecting lines earn bonus points.

• Find searches with a single common result [I suppose you’d have to call that a “YaGooglewhack”].

• Find searches with no common results whatsoever.

I’m sure YaGoogle! could become as popular as Googlewhacking, if it weren’t for one small problem: I’ve not managed to get anywhere remotely near any of the objectives. I’ve found the Yahoo! vs Google tool itself is a little buggy, but still: getting any more than a couple of vertical lines seems to be very tricky, and it seems to me that would be the easiest of those four objectives; as the saying I’m about to make up goes: just because it’s the easiest, doesn’t make it easy.

#1

David | 2004 / 02 / 28 – 10:42

Perseverance pays off: the results for server+down have [at present] nothing in common, whereas down+out appears to be the first YaGooglewhack, having only one common result.

#2

chl | 2004 / 03 / 01 – 12:40

What kinds of bugs have you encountered? I’d like to know so that I can fix ‘em all! ;-)

#3

David | 2004 / 03 / 01 – 12:46

Re #2: Nothing serious, I just found that sometimes the results didn’t display [just a blank space between the two search engine logos], and I had to resubmit the search.

Come to think of it, it might be a problem with the version of Flash I was using. It auto-updated to the latest version over the weekend and I don’t think I’ve experienced any bugs since then. :)

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