Dear Yahoo!
Welcome to Ubuntu! As a regular contributor to the Ubuntu project, I think it’s great that you are partnering with Canonical. Because of the agreement you signed, Canonical will be able to hire more people to work on Free software. Also, your contributions will help Ubuntu continue offering their OS at no cost to users. These are great things.
As things get going, though, there is one big thing (or a set of big things centered around one request) that you need to do to make the Ubuntu-Yahoo! user experience better. In short, you need to index the crap out of Ubuntu- and Linux-related sites. For example, if I do a Yahoo! search for launchpad bug 387765, I need the first link that comes up to be a link to the actual bug page for Launchpad bug #387765. As it stands now, a Yahoo! search for that phrase brings up two results, neither of which are relevant. The first of the two results is a link to the Debian Bugs page on Launchpad. As a contributor, this is not what I need.
For comparison, the same search on Google brings up 273 results, with the first result being a direct link to the bug report on Launchpad (which is now closed, thanks to the efforts of Fabien Tassin and the other Chromium packagers and hackers)). Google’s results not only link me directly to the bug that I am inquiring about, but also link me to a large number of pages that may be relevant to that bug report.
The example that I provide above concerns search results that are beneficial for contributors and developers, but what about regular users? When I search Yahoo! for “Dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu,” the first page in the search results is for the Ubuntu 8.04 “Dual Booting,” official documentation page. This page is out of date, especially given our migration to Grub2 in the 9.10 release.
These are just two examples, and my searches are likely not representative of the multitudes of search requests made daily on your site for Ubuntu-related tasks. Moreover, I won’t pretend to understand how incredibly complex indexing the web can be. I’m just writing to note that there is room for improvement, and I would like to see improvement so that our users can use your service to get relevant search results.
After all, improving Linux-related searches would be a win-win for us and for you. Ubuntu developers and users would get their work done, and problems solved, more quickly and effectively, and you would get more regular users performing their searches on Yahoo! This sounds pretty good to me. Here’s to hoping it can happen.
Hi Jim,
It’s good to see constructive posts like these about the Canonical Yahoo! deal. I had never thought about their indexing performance before, but they are very good points you raised.
- Karl
I think if yahoo would put some effort into the indexing side, we can see a couple of interesting and usefull search addons made, that help browse similar launchpad errors, ubuntu help, forums, etc.
http://developer.search.yahoo.com/wizard/index
This could turn out not nearly as bad as everyone thinks. Yay optimism.
Hi,
great post, I think everyone has more value by a post similar to this one (constructive) than rants, troll post and flame wars – but we all know that already don’t we
BTW, to which Yahoo representative did you send it?
Well done, totally agree. It’s better to help improove than to try to stop the changes. After all we can’t improove without changes, and changes are almost always dificult to be done and accepted. Than let’s help instead of criticise.
Did you try the same queries with the more sensible “Linux” instead of limiting the search to one specific distribution?
Given 8.04 is an LTS release I think it is perfectly acceptable for a search engine to return a page from the official documentation which refers to an LTS release. LTS releases are what less tech savvy and enterprise customers should be using. Most users don’t want to be upgrading their systems, or as is increasingly the suggested action _reinstalling_ every 6 months. This isn’t Windows!
Lets see what comes of this marriage between Canonical and Y!. If you want to slag off Y! there is better low hanging fruit.
[edited by the blog owner to remove an offensive email address.]
Many people miss the issue. For me it doesnt really matter what Ubuntu ships as default. 1
I- use Kubuntu,
2- I use google chrome anyway.
3- I always change my search default as it relate to my needs. My major concern about this issue is the fact that this decision was made for monetary gains and not for technical reasons. How does the user benefit from this move? Many people have been quick to point out how the money *could* used to get more developers to work on ubuntu and such. Well I would be inclined to go with this argument if canonical was a foundation like the Mozilla foundation, then everything they do and every benefit that is incurred to them would necessary be to the benefit of product like firefox, thunderbird etc. However Canonical is a company, A profit making company. The number one aim of canonical is to make profit. Hence It doesn’t necessarily have to apply that this deal would result to get more developers for ubuntu. (It might and it might not. ) as it stands the number one and direct beneficiary of this deal is Canonical.
Dont get me wrong I feel canonical needs to make profit and I would defo support them being a opensource friendly company, But it should not be at every cost. There have to be a line drawn on what is acceptable or not. You can build services round ubuntu and make money from this services, Ubuntuone, landscape, the propose ubuntu music service. canonical training and ubuntu certification, and their official paid support are all avenue that could be exploited from the Ubuntu brand and goodwill. But when it comes to something which is likely to affect user experience. Then decision on that should be done purely for merit and technical benefit to the user. I really they is no way that you can convince me that yahoo search is on par with google and user experience which comes with google, maps,translating search result on the fly, cache pages etc. You just cant beat the google experience when it comes to search.
The Idea that I could pay canonical into to use my service over others just doesnt rest well with me. and many others in the community.
Note: Microsoft’s Bing actually powers the results on Yahoo. So what you are actually asking is that Microsoft improve their search index. There was a bunch of articles a few weeks back that revealed just how patchy the Bing index is, and how slow it is to update. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to become as good as Google anytime soon.
Tux, no, I didn’t.
Is it true that it is powered by Bing?
Ifso getting them to fix their search results may be difficult
The deal may be made with Yahoo, but Microsoft has a corporate interest to make sure it’s not easy to fix problems with Linux or to find more information about it.
There have been article’s in the past of ‘colored’ search results where anti-linux news and pro-microsoft bias had a higher ‘bing-pageranking’.
I doubt Yahoo is able to do much about this.
Haha, the same search on Google now also turns up this page
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=launchpad+bug+387765&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=launchpad+bug+387765
http://www.bing.com/search?q=launchpad+bug+387765&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n
Google and Bing get it right, Yahoo doesn’t. So if Bing gets it right and Yahoo doesn’t, why in the hell do people keep on insisting that Yahoo is powered by Bing already? The US, the EU, and others haven’t approved it yet.
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