Tips2008 – What is Yahoo Thinking?

The other day I get this e-mail from my boss. In the e-mail he only says “Go to Yahoo and check out this search result for Computer Rental Tips2008”, which I read several times and wondered to myself if he intended to leave out the space between tips and the date.

Coming to the conclusion that no one would intend to leave out the space I proceeded to Yahoo and did the search with the space. Making it of course “Computer Rental Tips 2008“. The results were what I expected. I would say that about one third of the first 10 results were pages that our marketing company had written. From our Technical Discussion Forum, to our Small Business Magazine, to those content sucking scrape sites, it was nothing that I did not expect to see.

But the next day when my boss was back in his office he asked what I thought of the Yahoo Search, and I replied that it was exactly what I expected. To this he disappointedly answered, “Not with the space, without the space”.

So this Yahoo search interested him, the search of “Computer Rental Tips2008” with no space there at the end, because it returned a complete bunch of garbage. I mean not a single page on that search result was anything but a total SPAM page. So really what he is interested in is why the Yahoo Search Engine did not suggest that space between the word “Tips” and the year “2008”, and secondly why does Yahoo even bother to index the worthless list of results that the above search returned?

Unfortunately neither of us had the answer, but for me at least it did raise one more question, and that is “With a search engine this bad, could a Microsoft purchase do anything but improve the Yahoo product?”

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