Adding to the other things I don’t understand about Google: why does MSN Search find several hundred pages that link to FormSpring, while Google finds none? It’s been like that for the last month or so. I would love to hear from any SEO experts out there, as I’m just confused.
I mentioned earlier how MSN did the best job of complying with web standards (I should point out that the MSN Search homepage actually validates completely with the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype — I validated the MSN homepage previously). Could it really be that MSN also does a better job than Google at indexing the web?
Either I’m missing something, or we’re all hypnotized by the Google hype machine and addicted to an inferior search engine.
By the way, props go to this tool for bringing the discrepancy to my attention.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Ed Illig // Apr 21, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Olonoh Google search: concatenation of “/koolade” to “olonoh,” perhaps?
As for SEO acumen: Tim Altman has wrestled with the machinations of various search engines on behalf of our clients in the past–perhaps he has some ideas on how to beat your Google algorithmic mystery.
2 Tim // Apr 25, 2006 at 8:12 am
Well, I’m not exactly sure if this is a bug but it sure looks like an anomaly of some kind. I think Ed has sent you details that a space between the colon and your text is the difference between zilch and success (at least for formspring.com).
Another odd thing is if you go to the Google advanced search and use the link field it still returns zero. So by default the Google link does not work for http://www.formspring.com. Well it works with no results, so I guess ‘not work’ is arguable ;). So it looks like you may have uncovered something of a problem with Google.
Both Google and MSN return quite different results for other link searches by adding a space after the colon. You can see at MSN by searching for this: link:www.formspring.com or this: link: http://www.formspring.com (note the added space). Same thing happens at Google for getzapped.com. Yahoo doesn’t return results without the space for either (but it looks like it won’t return results for any site without the space).
It would be interesting to see why the difference and to see if at some point in time link:www.formspring.com (no space) returns results at Google. Perhaps it’s from updates to their crawler. Just a wild guess of course. No answer but maybe someone else can shed some light on the issue.
3 ade // Apr 25, 2006 at 9:34 am
Yeah, it definitely is an interesting question. I talked to Ed about it a little yesterday — I think the introduction of a space into the query changes the nature of the query. I think that’s the same as saying “show me all the pagest that link to anything and contain the text http://www.formspring.com“. If you notice, some if the results it shows in that query don’t actually link to the site, but just contain the term (e.g., the RSS feeds).
And there are several places on Google’s site, like the Sitemaps tool, that have a link to the link: query and each time the space is omitted.
Very odd.
4 Recursive Function » Blog Archive » MSN vs. Google — I’m not the only one // May 2, 2006 at 10:58 am
[...] Apparently I’m not the only one who’s seeing better search results from sites other than Google. I wrote about it a couple weeks ago, and have since found a couple others complaining about the exact same thing: [...]
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