yahoo 21

This graph is the number of referrals Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, sent to my site over the last few days. Looks like the hype is dying out. Though Bing did leapfrog Yahoo briefly, that lasted just one day.

One out of every 5 hits to my site is from a bot. I spent a fair bit of time this weekend analysing my log file for last month (which runs to gigabytes, and I ended up learning a few things about file system optimisation, but more on that later). 80% of the hits were from regular browsers. 20% were from robots. Here's a sample of the user-agents: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; <a href="http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)">http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<a href="http://www.google.com/bot.html)">http://www.google.com/bot.html)</a> Mediapartners-Google DotBot/1.0.1 (<a href="http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info">http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info</a>, [email protected]) Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 <a href="http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)">http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)</a> msnbot/1.1 (+<a href="http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)">http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</a> FeedBurner/1.0 (<a href="http://www.FeedBurner.com)">http://www.FeedBurner.com)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; attributor/1.13.2 +<a href="http://www.attributor.com)">http://www.attributor.com)</a> WebAlta Crawler/2.0 (<a href="http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)">http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)</a> (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU) Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I) ... You get the idea. The bulk of these are search engines. Over two-thirds of the bot requests were from Yahoo Slurp. Now, this struck me as weird. If I take the top 3 search engines that are sending traffic my way, ...

A timeline of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo acquisitions.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us.

Compare Yahoo and Google searches. This site lets you compare the rankings of each site on identical searches with Yahoo and Google.

How Yahoo got its Mojo back.

On the new features of search engines.

Yahoo’s “Magic Crystal Ball” New Age Oracle or Ouija2K? I got a mail from a Brian, who found my chat with [email protected] through a Yahoo search. I did the same, and came up with this even more hilarious conversation.

Yahoo PayDirect is free again. This is the first time I’m seeing a paid site turning free. I’m sure Internet history of some sort was made. Yahoo!

For those as ignorant about the World Cup as I am, the FIFA website has a summary of Stage 1 and Stage 2.

This purple and crimson diamond is supposed to be the most valuable object in the world. (Weight for weight.)

Free annual reports online.

Here’s a good reason for me not to advertise my website. Here’s a site on time travel anamolies in films, which is not accessible, thanks to Yahoo’s restrictions on data transfer. One listing on Metafilter probably killed the site. But then, the question probably is, is that a reason to hate Yahoo?

Yahoo is outside the jurisdiction of French law.

The AC-130 Sounds like a nice plane.

50% of all Net surfing is done on the sites of Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and Napster. There’s consolidation of web properties for you!

eBay will delist items associated with Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, etc. Yahoo is cleaning its porn content. AOL is, however, using neural networks to automatically filter content.

After telling Yahoo to remove Nazi memorabilia from its auction site, France is now considering taxing computers and other recording devices to compensate artists for piracy. I mean, Paris and art is all fine, but this is crazy! And Germany’s apparantly already done this.

Now Yahoo! will charge a fee for auctions. No more free PCs. No more free ISPs. No more ad revenues. No more free auctions. The trend is clear. Pay! Unfortunately, they’ll also monitor what’s being sold – an indication that country-specific legal barriers are creeping into the Internet.

Google likes directory sites. Google likes Yahoo!. Google uses peer review. Google is good.

While we’re on metrics, here are some search engine metrics from useit.com, Media Metrix, Nielsen’s NetRatings and StatMarket. Yahoo’s right on top, followed by MSN.