We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began last night and should be complete very soon.

Keep the feedback coming!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

We strive to show the most useful information in search results. We look at multiple sources for titles and abstracts, including page content, anchor text in the links to a page, Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP); and we pick the best based on our algorithms. You might have seen some of the features that we have implemented with this approach, such as quick links for Wikipedia, and local business data. However, some webmasters have had issues with titles and abstracts in ODP and have adopted the ‘NOODP’ META tag to indicate to search engines not to use them. As Tim Mayer promised a few days earlier talking to Barry Schwartz on The Pulse, we are launching support for this tag in tonight’s weather update.

We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

or

<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

If we find any of these tags on your page, we will not consider ODP titles or abstracts as candidates for your URL in search results. We are reindexing content on the web to launch this change. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index that are typical of weather updates.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Site Explorer forum or refer to our webmaster resources page.

Thanks!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

We launched a new Yahoo! Search Crawler, Yahoo! Slurp earlier this week. In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.

While transitioning to the new crawler over the past few weeks, we had been running both crawlers in tandem. In some cases, this increased the frequency of Yahoo Search requests to websites. Now, with the new crawler in full production, we have turned off the old crawler and site owners should see a much lower crawl load without a loss in content coverage.

With this change of behavior in the crawler, you may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.

Let us know what you observe through our feedback form, or if you have any technical issues with Slurp please contact support.

Thank you to everyone who helped us with this update!

David Simpson
Yahoo! Slurp Team

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

If you’re tuning back in to the Searchblog after watching the World Cup, then you?re just in time for our first weather report of the summer!

We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

Remember, we recently beefed up our online help and resources, and the best way to provide us with feedback is via the online form.

Please write in and let us know what you think.

Thanks!

Rajat Mukherjee
Yahoo! Search

We rolled out another index update late last week. You?ll see some changes in ranking along with what is in the index. For feedback, we are moving away from the email address “ystfeedback at yahoo.com” to a simple form available at http://help.yahoo.com/search/feedback.

Please write in and let us know what you think.

Thanks again!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search

We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. Those who follow these weather updates may have noticed that they are occurring more frequently; this is the result of improvements to the indexing system.

Thank you all for your input and keep the feedback coming!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search