This Salon.Com article is pretty much the same “can we really trust Google” article that every other newspaper and tech journal seemed to run a couple weeks ago. Well at least it was pretty standard fare until this howler comparing Inktomi favorably to Google,
Asked about this possibility, Tim Cadogan, Yahoo’s vice president of search, was noncommittal. “The best way to think about that is, we’re focused on our goal,” he said. “And we’re going to use whatever components technologies there are to get to that goal. To date Google has been a very good partner to us. We’ve been very happy to use them.” But Cadogan also said that Yahoo plans to invest in Inktomi’s technology, and, when asked if he thought that Inktomi’s results were as good as Google’s, Cadogan said that “a couple of third-party studies show that Inktomi is slightly better than Google.” (This study — which was commissioned by Inktomi but appears quite free of bias — found that Inktomi came up with slightly more “relevant” results for a given list of queries.)
To put it plainly, Inktomi sucks and its search results are next to useless compared to Google.
For example, suppose we go to Inktomi and search on “animal rights.” Now it really does not bother me that my site, which is usually returned in the #3 or #4 slot by Google, does not show up in the top 100 results returned by Inktomi.
No, what indicates to me that Inktomi is a complete waste of time is that this About.Com page is returned in the #6 slot by Inktomi. This page has absolutely nothing at all to do with animal rights. It is simply About.Com’s top level directory. The word “animal” doesn’t even appear on the page, and “rights” only appears in the “all rights reserved” copyright notice.
Yet Inktomi’s search engine thinks this is the sixth most relevant page for a search on “animal rights.” That is simply pathetic and shows the advantage of Google’s scheme of ranking pages in part based on the extent of inbound links.
Source:
The Google Backlash. Farhad Manjoo, Salon.Com, June 25, 2003.