Re: Altavista better than Google for genealogy searches

On Thu, 15 May 2008 04:38:17 +0200, Steve Hayes
<hayesmstw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in soc.genealogy.misc:

>It seems that Altavista is much better than Google for genealogical
searches. 

Perhaps, the strenght of Google is its weakness !  Google tries to
locate as many pages as possible, but not altavista.  But at this
time, Google seems to focus on some operation to clean spam pages
(I say that because I submitted my genealogy site with 30000 URLs,
one per family, and Google has indexed less than 200 of those pages).
Also, google changes the result depending on your browser settings.


Google finds 85 300 000 results for genealogy

Yahoo has 109 000 000 (the difference can be either the accuracy of
extrapolation or because Yahoo has more spamdex pages than Google)

MSN has 83 900 000, very close to Google

Altavista has 111 000 000, so in theory, more spamdex pages.


Perhaps, the spammers are tuning their pages as a function of the
Google algorithm to reject spamdex pages and you will find more
relevant pages in Altavista where the spammers' algorithm is not
finetuned...  Quite strange indeed !



Something strange happened in those tests.  I ran the first from
www.google.fr and my own site was 3rd for genealogy.  I rerun it
from www.google-dance-tool.com (comparing many google sites) and
again, my site was in the top ten on google.com and google.fr
(and I was known likely from cookies on those sites), 25 on google.be
23 on google.ca and google.de, 21 on google.it and google.co.uk,
something weird because my site is not supposed to be there !
It is like if google detected the language of my web browser and
translated the search for the equivalent in French.  

I repeated the same search from www.google-dance-tool.com with
genealogie (in French).  The ranking was different (I was missing
from the top 100 of google.fr) but very good ranking every time.

I repeated the same search with genealogy and another computer
but same IP and no cookies.  The ranking was still very good
(around 25) but different, this with genealogy and having French
as the preferred language.

I did it a last time, now using English as the preferred language
and my site was no more in the list for the 9 google sites I
tried.

I didn't run the same tests on the various altavista, yahoo or
msn sites but I know yahoo has different results depending on the
language in your preferences.  Maybe Steve has something like
EN-ZA (English, South Africa) as preferred language, which may
give something different compared to EN-GB or EN-UK for instances.

The conclusion would be that Google may adapt the search result to
yourself, to the language of your browser, to your previous search,
etc.  In my case, I saw my web site where it was not expected.

I would not be surprised that the result for your search on my
computer would not be the same on your computer...


Denis