Default Search Change

[Mike Basinger]

I agree with Matthew. I think if the user experience team feels that
Yahoo! gives as good an experience for search as Google for Ubuntu
users then I don't think it matters what the default is.

I did a unscientific test last night on commonly asked Ubuntu
questions (How to install Nvidia card, sound problems in Ubuntu,
Broadcom card in Ubuntu, etc...). Yahoo and Google put up similar
results, with most of the same pages listed on the first page of
search but in slightly different order. On Yahoo tech support answers
from blogs seemed to be ranked higher than official support channels
(help.ubuntu.com, wiki, forums). On Google, official Ubuntu source
rank slightly higher than blogs, with the forum ranking the highest
(which can be hit or miss on good tech support). This was only one
person doing five search, not enough to be a good sample of data.

I know from looking at the forums traffic, Google has about 200
crawlers pulling data from the forums at any given time while Yahoo
has about 20, of course the Yahoo crawler could be 10x more
efficient:).

Mike

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:35 AM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Jono Bacon <jono at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> If you have any questions or queries surrounding this move, don't hesitate in getting in touch with Rick Spencer<rick.spencer at canonical.com>   (head of the Ubuntu Desktop Team) or myself.
>
> Has any analysis been done of the quality of the Yahoo search by
> comparison with the Google search? The primary thing that people are
> likely to raise seems to me to be whether this change damages the user
> experience by providing an inferior search, on the basis that Google
> is the market leader in this area.
>
> --
> Matthew East
> http://www.mdke.org
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>
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-- 
Mike Basinger
mike.basinger at gmail.com
http://www.mikesplanet.net