I was just checking the weekend Search Engine stats for Craig’s Little Buddy and saw that I got more hits from Yahoo! than Google.

My site doesn’t get a ton of traffic or anything so this isn’t some amazing metric but I gotta say I’m pretty shocked. The queries from Yahoo! actually seem better as well. Here, check ‘em out:

Yahoo! Searches

1. custom sz520 for sale craigslist
2. 1963 buick 401 carb replacement for rochester
3. 1977 aeroglass trihull boats
4. 90k mile tuneup for nissan pathfinder
5. aquasport boats for sale
6. craig’s little buddy
7. craigs list waverunner houston
8. craigs list zodiac yamaha
9. craigslist denver co\used 1989 toyota corolla le\for sale by owner
10. craigslist little buddy
11. craigslist pontoon boats
12. craigslittlebuddy
13. ecs 945gzfm
14. ernie ball music man silhouette guitar peizo
15. extend-a-truck™ hitch denver
16. menzari wheels sacramento
17. vw cabrio for sale in lake charles, louisiana

Googel Searches

1. craigslittlebuddy
2. search all of craigslist little buddy
3. craigs little buddy
4. http://www.craigslittlebuddy.com
5. craig’s little buddy
6. craigs search buddy

Kinda crazy huh?

It looks like everyone coming in through Google is just too lazy to type in the browser’s address bar and is performing a search instead. Its pretty hard for me to even consider those “searches”. On the other hand the Yahoo! queries are the actual queries I want.

I’m no SEO pro but when doing titles, H1’s, URL’s etc the Yahoo! queries are pretty much what I was shooting for. Some of the queries rank well on Yahoo! & some don’t. I’ll look into the ranking voodoo and try to make that stuff better but I am encouraged that I’m getting hits for these queries.

Pretty interesting stuffs

Sweet! My beloved Yahoo! Mail will not die. Microsoft backs away from Yahoo!. Pretty crazy.

I’m no famous tech blogger so get your info from these good peeps:

• Sarah Lacy
• TechCrunch
• Mashable

I’m pretty much on the verge of dumping my.yahoo.com for iGoogle. I’ve used my.yahoo.com for years now. I was pretty stoked with the new BETA. Hell, I even did a usability study there ’cause I actually gave a shit… but no more. Why?

This is why:

Why are there fucking ads on this page? Some douche sitting at Yahoo figured that people like me would click on it twice a year and $.05 x a lot = enough money to justify pissing loyal users off.

Eh, I’m sick of it. All I really used was the Yahoo Mail preview anyways and there’s a shitty Yahoo Mail widget for iGoogle. Its ugly as sin but, hey, no ads.

I try to like Yahoo! ’cause they’re all happy n shit but sometimes I think “do you really think you’re in competition with Google with shit like this?”

So I just stumbled upon their SiteExplorer and set up a profile for phatduckk.com. I’m running on the assumption that this is pretty much Yahoo’s version of Google’s Webmaster Tools/Sitemaps.

Just like Google you have to authenticate your ownership of the site. I had to create an HTML file called y_key_9cb39696f3bf5be3.html and make sure the contents of that file were e6c5f476b7ce26bb. Alrighty then… I added the file to my web root, checked to see it was working right, clicked “verify now” and then I saw this:

And a message that says:

We will authenticate your site ownership by checking this file within 24 hours.

WTF is wrong with you Yahoo!??? I have to wait up to 24 hours for you to hit a fucking URL & check that the document you download from my server contains a specific string? You slow bastards!!!

Complaining doesn’t us any good… so, since I know you guys use PHP, I decided help out and write the code for you. Enjoy…

All joking aside - If Google does something instantaneously you might wanna aim to accomplish the same sort of task in less than a day if you really wanna compete with ‘em. Honestly, I still have no fucking clue what this tool does considering I’m still not verified. Unless they verify me within the next couple minutes I’ll probably lose interest…

I was searching for some stuff to fix a bug in this WordPress, Digg Plugin and stumbled upon a weirdness in Google. I don’t know if this is a bug or not - but it is kinda strange.

The background is that the plugin would link over to Digg with whacky ass HTML entities in the query string causing the title field (at Digg) to be pre-populated incorrectly. You’d see the HTML entities representation of a single quote instead of the character itself. So, ’ instead of ‘ or … instead of … (dot dot dot)

WordPress can take part of the blame ’cause it handles a bunch of stuff in an obnoxious way but the plugin should deal with it. If you’re writing a plugin that’s gonna lives in a lame environment you’ve gotta handle the BS that comes along with it.

Anyways - I was Googleing the entities that were causing this problem and started noticing that Google reacted strangely. Check out the results when I search for ☺

Or click here to search and see for yourself.

Pretty strange huh? So I looked up some HTML entities and just tried a bunch of searches to see what I got. Google properly deals with and escapes the ones that could be use for injection (>, <, ” etc) but otherwise it just barfs. The reason I say “barf” is ’cause there’s no “your search - xxxxx x - did not match any documents” notification as with a “normal” zero-result search. The page is pretty much blank as if they had no idea what to do with your query.

What if you’ve encountered some random HTML entity (like ☛) and you want to search for it instead of looking trough an entity reference? This is fair isn’t it? We Google random MySQL error messages etc instead of looking through a reference page… I know my coworkers and I do.

Now - how does Yahoo! Search deal with this stuff?

The Yahoo! Search for “•” is a different kind of wrong. At a quick glance it looks like the peeps at Yahoo! ditch the “fluff” (&, # and ;) and convert the symbol to an Integer. Again, it’s just a different version of wrong.

Personally I’d consider this a bug in both search engines. The user is searching for one thing yet they’re returning results (or no results in Google’s case) for something else.

Sigh… exciting shit huh? I’m off to save the princess.

Booya