A Look Back at the Top Searches of 2004
What a year. I’ve been following searches for five years, and I can definitely say 2004 has been the most interesting. If you don’t believe me, take a look at our Top Searches of 2004 recap. While it doesn’t detail everything we saw over the past twelve months, it’s a great starting point to review the year gone by.
I love pop culture, so most of my favorite search stories of 2004 centered around some of the fluff that keeps the (search) engine chugging. Britney’s meltdowns, Janet’s breast, and reality TV were just a few of the items that made it an interesting year for me. And in 2004, we started covering search trends every day in the Buzz Log. I’d encourage you to browse back through the archives (starting in mid-June) as a informative complement to the eye-opening Top Searches page.
And as we head into 2005, I’d be remiss if I didn’t leave you with a list of my own. From Andrea, my colleague in buzz, here are the top misheard searches of 2004. It’s a short list, but a list that’s sure to make you grin.
Top (sic) Searches of 2004:
1. Presidential Poles
2. King Author
3. Serious Satellite Radio
4. Eyes of March
Happy New Year and keep on searchin’!
Erik Gunther
Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor
When are we going to see the Yahoo Desktop search tool. I understand it is based on X1 and looking forward to using that.
It’s interesting to see how much different Y and G reports.
Unlike on Google, when a user does a search on Yahoo, my blog’s main page shows up (when relevant info is found, of course), but the individual archived pages of my site do not. Yahoo has crawled and cataloged a couple of my large monthly archive pages, but not the single article page (except for a couple of rare cases where a normal website has linked specifically to one of these pages). Is Yahoo specifically ignoring individual pages on blogs unless the page is linked to by another site, or is it just a problem with my site in particular?
Although my site (which is only a few months old) is posted with blog software, the content is made up of completely original items that certainly seem to be just as relevant as many items found on other (non-blog) websites that get properly crawled by Yahoo. Im a professional journalist and writer (under a different name), and I’m trying to hold my new blog to the same standards expected when I’m writing paid material for mainstream publications — so to have my articles ignored by Yahoo is troublesome, especially if its simply because of the blog format.
It’s also not good for people doing Yahoo searches, because they end up getting a search result that leads to an index page where the article they’re looking for may no longer be appearing…. and my blog’s subhead dominates the search-result’s description instead of the more relevant info that could be found in the article’s title or body text.
I know that the search industry is trying to avoid having personal-journal type blogs and link-list blogs appearing above more relevant results, but not all blogs should be treated in this way. Content relevance, not format/software/domain/meta-tags, should be the key to delivering search results, even if the other elements are weighed into the final ranking. Microsofts Search, admittedly, is logging my site in the same way as Yahoo. Only Google (and sites using Google results, such as AOL) is correctly returning individual pages from my site. Not coincidentally, I receive much more traffic from Google-powered search engines than I do from Yahoo or MS; and people finding my site through Google seem much more likely to stay on my site for a while, instead of leaving after a single page view. Try searching for celebritycola.blogspot.com to see what I mean.
My other theory is that MS and Yahoo may be avoiding Blogspot websites because Google now owns that company. I look forward to any ideas people might have regarding this.
Liek the yahoo search engien a lot these days. Is thinking of coming up with a variant of the( weekly, geographically differentiated) Google zeitgeist?
Here’s our ‘humourous’ search terms. Happy new year!
http://eyedropper.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/amusing_results.html