Why Microsoft Wants to Buy Yahoo - Because Microsoft Search Ranking Algorithm Have Serious Flaw

February 2nd, 2008 by Andrew Chen

Well that is my explanation of why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. Let me know whether it make sense to you if you read on.

Most visitors of my blog are coming from search engine. Specifically most of them are sent to my blog from Google. If you look at the following screen shot you will find 90 percent of the traffic is coming from search engine. Google is accounted for 86.4% and yahoo is accounted for 2.7%.

Siusic Dot Com Traffice Source Break Down

One thing I don’t understand when I look at the chart is that according to statistics,

Google is accounted for about 60% of all internet searches. Following Google is Yahoo and Microsoft. So 86 percent sounds too high for Google. Another thing I don’t understand is that I don’t see any traffic sent from live.com, the Microsoft search engine. So I want to figure out what was going on.

According to Google analytics the keyword that brought me the most traffic is the term “wintems.exe”. That means a lot of people came to my blog because they search for the term “wintems.exe” and they found a post on my blog. Most likely this is the post found, Hard to Kill Malware: Wintems.exe and Hldrrr.exe. This post is about how to remove malware “wintems.exe”. In fact this post is ranked very high in Google or Yahoo if you search for the term “wintems.exe”. It was ranked number 4 in Google and Number 2 on Yahoo. But when I search the same term on live.com I don’t see that post at all. Instead I found my another post, Covering up an Annoying Bug of Sidebar Widgets, on the third page of the search result. The content of that post have nothing to do with “wintems.exe”. The only reason that it appear in the search result is that there is a link on my blog’s side bar that is linked to the post about “wintems.exe”.

I originally thought that maybe my post about “wintems.exe” was not indexed by live.com. But when I did a search on “siusic” and “wintems.exe” together the post did come up in the result. So how do you explain this? Let’s say you have two articles on the same web site. One talks about apple and mentions apple a lot. The other one talks about orange only but it links to the one talks about apple. A search engine that has good relevancy should give you the article about apple if you search for “apple”. Am I right? If the search engine gives you the article about “orange” when you search for apple then the only conclusion is that the search ranking of the search engine has serious flaw.

When people search for something they only care about two things, the response time and the relevancy of the result. Looks like Google or Yahoo is superior to Live.com in terms of search technology. I would believe to some extend it explains why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo to battle with Google in the search market.