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Google search and Yahoo! search and my search

Posted by admin on January 15, 2007 in SEO Theory

I just did a spot check on Digital Point’s keyword suggestion tool and noticed something interesting. More people search for “Google” (182,858 queries per day on the WordTracker side) than search for Yahoo! (126,312 queries per day). However, more people search for “Yahoo! search” (3809 queries per day) than for “Google search” (2214 queries per day).

One of the great mysteries of search engine optimization is why people use search engines to search for search engines. Bill Slawski asked Why do people Google Google in December 2006. He didn’t even try to answer the question.

I have seen many attempts to explain the phenomenon. Perhaps the most popular idea is that people use their search engines as navigational tools. But if you’re already on Google, why are you searching for Google? Maybe people are just trying to get a clean search results page (Google could test that idea by embedding a link next to the search box that says, “Clear results”).

I actually did not know until some time after Google launched that one need only click on the Google logo to clear the search results. Oddly enough, my mouse cursor does not change shape when I pass it over the logo. I only discovered this ability by mistake. So there I am with a page full of search results that I don’t want and I just want to start with a clean slate (for the psychological effect). I could type “google.com” in the address window of my browser or I could type “google” in the search box.

Or I could just click on the logo, but I didn’t always know I could just click on the logo.

Seems like a plausible idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. That is, when I look at Google Trends, it tells me that more people search for Yahoo! than search for Google — at least that is so on Google.

WordTracker doesn’t get its data from Google, so perhaps all or many of the search engine queries extend the idea of starting over with a clean slate by replacing the slate. “I’m on search engine A. It’s not giving me what I want. Let me try search engine B.”

At this point one might reasonably ask what all this has to do with search engine optimization theory. And the predictably inevitable Michael Martinez answer is: everything.

180,000 people are not trying to find out how well Google ranks on Google every day. I just checked, it’s still number 1 for “google”. But it may be that people are trying to reset their query context. The most active cities, according to Google Trends, in the Great Google Query-off are from the United Kingdom.

I often see people from the U.K. asking questions about the American Google versus the U.K. Google. I wonder where Trends gets its data from. Does all that data come from Google.com or does it incorporate all of Google’s regional search engines?

What happens if you query Google.co.uk for Google? Do you see google.com in the top search results? Is this merely a shortcut for people who want to change horses in the middle of the stream?

When you’re optimizing for search engines, you need to understand what people search for, where they search, and why they search on one engine rather than another. Searching for Yahoo! on Yahoo! almost makes sense in an entirely different way. You can cut out all the dynamic garbage on Yahoo!’s front page and navigate through their service much more quickly.

Is that why so many people search for “Yahoo! search”? Maybe. Maybe they just want to check their mail. The second most popular “yahoo” query, according to Digital Point’s WordTracker column, is “Yahoo mail”. “Check Yahoo mail” and “yahoo email” are also very popular expressions. So perhaps Yahoo!’s interface is so screwed up a lot of people just conveniently use other search engines to navigate through Yahoo!.

Except for Google Earth and Google Maps, I don’t see much of a trend in Google queries. I guess people just want to find their favorite search engine’s main page. What would happen if Google took my suggestion and made it easier (more obvious) for people to clear the search results page?

Using search for navigation is nothing new. The search engines have encouraged Webmasters to embed search boxes on their sites for years. I’ve done it more than once, have used more than one service. They all pretty much suck equally because they do not update their indexes frequently enough (and if most of my pages were in the supplemental index, I’d be really screwed if I were depending on Google’s search).

I do have enough content on my sites that people find us through search quite often. I don’t know how much of that search is driven by the various search boxes and how much is truly organic search. Site searching becomes a necessity when you have a large, complex site. I provide my visitors with clearly obvious links to our site map pages but they don’t get much traffic. Maybe that’s just a testament to how good my on-site navigation is, and maybe it’s just a testament to how good my search engine placements are.

But Google and Yahoo! have pretty bad on-site navigation. Google’s is just absolutely awful. I often have to query Google for sections I don’t remember the exact URLs to. The same is true for Yahoo!. In fact, of the major search engines, the one I rarely have to search itself for is Ask. They do a pretty good job of getting me to where I want to be — but is that because they don’t offer as much as Yahoo! and Google or because their interface is better?

Comparing what I know about how people navigate around my network with what I know about how people navigate through search engines, I feel as though search engine placement is critical for non-competitive purposes. When you create a brand that people know about and come back to on their own, they may still have trouble finding what they want. So you need to help them find that portion of your content that is closest to what they are looking for.

At the present time, I don’t have many search tools on my network. I’m tired of upating deep pages with new query boxes. People do use them, but I cannot force or entice the search engines to reindex every page that is modified, much less to index every page in the first place. Nor can I make them any more responsive than they choose to be. Some of my deep pages are only crawled a few times a year. Some are crawled several times a month.

I actually optimize pages and portions of my network for the purpose of speeding up the recrawl process. I have to because when I make changes I really don’t want to wait six months for the search engines to find my newly updated content. I wrote about that process on SEOmoz last year when I discussed link warehousing. As with a physical warehouse which stores goods temporarily, you place links in a link warehouse for a short period of time for the purpose of getting them crawled.

I’ve been asked if there is a risk to using a link warehouse. I cannot speak for the search engines, but I’ve never been penalized for moving my own links around my own sites. I feature important content on a high-crawl page but I also link to it more permanently from other sources, including my site map pages. I’m not hiding anything. Quite the contrary, I’m telling the search engines, “Here is something new“. And they go crawl the new content, which links back to the rest of the network appropriately.

Even so, even with Google’s new daily data refresh, I have to plan out my SEO campaigns well in advance. If Yahoo! were faster than Google at indexing my pages, and more consistent, I would probably rely almost exclusively on Yahoo! for internal navigation. I can say the same about Ask (which will never happen) and Windows Live Search.

The problem is, as I pointed out above, they all pretty much suck. And while it’s true I could install a search engine on my network and just index my own sites — well, actually, I’ve done that. Problem is, to get a good quality search resource, you have to pay some money. And I’m just not comfortable with the idea of paying for internal navigation tools.

So I am very careful about how I design my sites. I ensure that the internal navigation is tight, explicit, crawl-friendly, and encourages as frequent crawling as possible. And I utilize my link warehouses to update the search engines at the fastest rate in which they’ll accept data from me.

Because people Google Google and Yahoo! Yahoo! every day, and that means they are using search engines to look for what we would consider to be the most obvious things sitting right under their noses. It doesn’t matter why they search for Google. What matters is that when they search for whatever I have, I need to make sure they find it on as many search engines as possible.

You never know when someone may ask Ask if Mizuo Peck is Sacagawea (that query, as I type this, shows a page I created on December 26, 2006). If they do, there is a good chance they’ll find my Mizuo Peck article.

In fact, if you query Ask, Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo! for “seo theory”, you should see this blog appear in the top ten results. It’s not a competitive query, but I didn’t have to wait six months to hit the top ten on all the major services. As people begin to mention what I’m writing here, more people will start searching for the blog. So I’ve got to be visible for the searchers. I need to make sure they have shortcuts to my content.

Need I say more?