Tim Mayer of Yahoo visited WebProWorld recently to set the record straight on the difference between how regular Yahoo results appear and how Site Match results appear.
Speculate on the proxy results in WebProWorld.
Check out the Yahoo proxy search here.
Ronniethedodger pointed to what he thought were Site Match results:
http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=money+business/v=2/TID
=F251_44/SID=e/l=WS1/R=6/H=0/*
-http://www.everythingaboutvitamins.com/.
These links are what Daniel Brandt calls, “plain “click counter” redirects that appear on every URL.”
Tim responded that this was not in fact a Site Match link, and that Site Match links look like this:
rdrw1.yahoo.com/click?u=http://www.ibiblio.org/tkan/xmcd&
y=022F06033A99E6E8&i=482&c=9106&
q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7%7C%7B%3Fos~fzm6&e=utf-8&r=25&
d=wow-en-us&n=8R545H097DP408T1&s=21&t=&m=4072437D
&x=01D37651EA37F317.
(For the unmangled link visit Yahoo’s post.)
If you’d like to see Yahoo’s results unveiled check out Daniel Brandt’s proxy search over at Search showdown: Yahoo v. Google. Brandt’s proxy strips out the first redirect that appears on a standard Yahoo search, and it’s in the secondary redirects that we see the “rdrw1.”
The proxy gets results from two different data centers, so sometimes the beginning “rdrw1” changes to “rdre1.”
Brandt’s been recording data and has identified several parameters in the url that are likely to have some bearing regarding how these links are added to the results.
The identified (though yet undefined) parameters are:
MI=ic
MI=ss
MI=free
MI=other
MI=sitematch
Brandt’s proxy search is an excellent way to see which of your competitors have possibly paid to get urls in Yahoo’s results.
murdok and Google-Watch appear with the MI=other parameter and neither of us have paid for inclusion, which suggests a relationship between MI=other and RSS feeds.
Brandt added that, “[Danny] Sullivan’s site was this way when we talked two weeks ago, but now his XML ‘My Yahoo’ link is gone in the main search.yahoo.com listings, and he has a normal link on my proxy. So that reinforces the theory that the XML and MI=other are related.”
As Yahoo’s set to drop the Inktomi pfi links on April 15th, what we’re seeing now may change dramatically. Says Brandt, “I am interested in how the links will change on April 15 — how many of what Tim calls a Site Match link, and what I merely refer to an ‘almost all of them are paid’ link, will get dropped by Yahoo.”
Check out the Yahoo proxy search.
Garrett French is the editor of murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
