Yahoo Directory Ranks Pages by Popularity
The Yahoo! Directory has gone under some revisions. One such revision is that it now defaults the sorting of the directory listings by “popularity”. What does “by popularity” mean? Well, in the Yahoo! Directory Help section it states as follows.
By default, Directory site listings are presented sorted by popularity and relevance. Sites that are most popular with users or the most relevant to the category appear at the top of the site listings. The order of web sites or web documents is based upon Yahoo! Search Technology. If the category is large, the listings will display over multiple pages with pagination displayed at bottom of the page.
If Danny Sullivan didn’t write an entry on this at the SEW blog, I might have missed the thread at the Search Engine Watch Forums. Danny has some nice points on why Yahoo! should not make the directory look and feel more like the Web search. Danny said, about the popularity ranking, “I’ve always felt that clickthrough measurement, along with perhaps some link analysis, was part of the secret sauce.” I asked Tim Mayer about it, and he said he will get back to me, we will see.
The SEW Forum thread notes these changes:
1. The directory home page has changed. It now has a new look and feel.
http://dir.yahoo.com/
2. There are a lot of sites without descriptions.
3. There are a lot more internal links using the @ sybmol
4. Some of the listings are not showing up in the “websearch results” with a link to the directory category
5. A lot of new listings
6. RSS Feeds. I don’t remember this before.
Edit/Delete Message
An other large change is the “Sites 1 – 40 of X”, making people click the next button to see more results for that category.
—
Columnist Barry Schwartz is the Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales.
