Why do Google and Yahoo search show different results?

Question

Why do Google and Yahoo show different results when searching for the same thing? Do they search in different areas?

Answer 1

Wow ok im sorry but most these answers are not giving you the full story. First Google is a search engine and yahoo is a search engine, but Yahoo and Google both have a separate directory that sometimes affects their search results but that is last case scenario.



To simply answer your question as to why Google Results are different the Yahoo results is because they are 2 different search engines designed my 2 different companies using 2 different algorithms. So of course they wont give the same results.



Now as to the details behind that, i hope you have some time on your hands because there is an entire industry devoted to figuring that out and how to apply that to websites...that industry is called Search Engine Optimization.



Basically put, Yahoo and Google both use many factors when determining the results to a specific search. Those factors include but are not limited to, keyword density, meta descriptions, meta keywords (to a lesser extent, google really doesn't care about these but yahoo still does) page titles, and relevant content, contextual content and number of links and anchor text (the words that actually are the link in to another page) H1 and H2 tags in the body and so on and so on.



The main difference is though that Google puts a large emphasis on inbound links pointing to your site. Google considers a link to your site from some other website as a Vote for your site. So the more links you have pointing to it Google things it must be relevant. But Google also knows about link farms and spamming tricks etc... so now google has a trust factor that they add into it for each link.



So you can have 3000 unrelated links to your site but someone with say 50 trusted and relevant links pointing to their site can beat you out.



There is a lot more that goes into it but like i said you can read up on it if you want to. Here is a link to my blog that talks some more about search engines and Search engine optimization http://www.anythingbutcoffee.com/category/seo/

Answer 2

Yahoo uses content based page ranking to decide which websites get listed in the first pages of results ---best



google uses social ranking system which basically decides that since hundreds of other sites link to that site then it must be good so we will list it first etc... Which many website owners learned quickly how to trick and manipulate google search results ..Thats why when searching topics in google you get stuck with many link farm and ad factory type websites instead of content rich websites that actually have what you were looking for.

Answer 3

google is a search engine and yahoo is a directory. a search engine uses a worm or a spider (programs) to search 4 stuff automatically. a human chooses the results for a directory (sorta).

Answer 4

Hi



Yeah its basically the different way they index pages as R 'n' D says.



And Yahoo has both a directory and search engine.



Also, webmasters submit their pages and the search engines find pages by crawling those sites and following links to others. Many sites on the internet aren't indexed by any search engines.



Web marketing is my specialty. If you want any help in this area feel free to ask.



Regards



Chris

Answer 5

Different search engines give different results. Uh, next question.