It was about 11:22 AM Eastern Time. Already fixed, but you know…
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Yahoo Image Search – Epic FAIL
Category: yahoo
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About Yahoo Image Search
Nobody promised anything, but if you have an image search function it better produce some meaningful results. Since Google Images somehow managed to get blocked at the place where I am sitting right now (probably doing too good finding what you’re not supposed to be looking at), I use Yahoo Image search for blog posts.
Boy, is that a sad picture. No matter what I am looking for, Yahoo Images just dumps dozens of result pages from Flickr. If you run a search for “microsoft commercial“, guess what would you see on pages 2 to 16? A whole bunch of images of military airplanes and helicopters – all from Flickr. Only starting at page 16 there are some easily recognizeable Microsoft-related images.
Given that Flickr is blocked here as well, it’s just an exercise in futility to find any sort of images. But this was worth mentioning, because if it wasn’t for a problem with Google Images I would’ve never thought there is really no alternative.
And you thought Yahoo was doing a good job too, right?
Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a statement that basically says “your software is badwe know better”. Alright, we thought, and ventured to check on Google. The result was astonishing – the difference was 0.6%. Either Google is very good at serving ads that are traceable, or Yahoo/Overture isn’t being honest. Or both.