Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

As 2006 comes to a close, a number of major search providers have released their top search queries. Even though the results may be heavily doctored, they’re still valuable insights into the PPC industry.

Yahoo: Britney Spears, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, American Idol, Beyonce Knowles, Chris Brown, Pamela Anderson, Lindsay Lohan

Google: bebo , myspace, world cup, metacafe, radioblog, wikipedia, video, rebelde, mininova, wiki

Lycos: Poker, MySpace, RuneScape, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Pokemon, WWE, Golf, Spyware, Britney Spears

MSN Live: Ronaldinho, Shakira, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Harry Potter, Eminem, Pamela Anderson, Hilary Duff, Rebelde, Angelina Jolie

AOL: Weather, Dictionary, Dogs, American Idol, Maps, Cars, Games, Tattoo, Horoscopes, Lyrics

You can view the Top 10 Searches of 2006 spreadsheet on Google Docs, if you’d like. The data came from the following sources: Yahoo, Google, Lycos, MSN, and AOL.

Initial observation shows that searches are primarily dominated by celebrity terms, and that AOL’s searches are corrupted by their “AOL Keyword” search system. Google’s are likewise corrupted by what I suspect is manual filtering to produce tailored techie terms. Yahoo, MSN Live, and Lycos share 50% of their terms with others’ top terms, while Google and AOL come in last at 20% and 10% respectively, an indication of poor search quality.

Did you ever think that Yahoo Search would adopt Google’s sitemaps service? Apparently the protocol is now its own standard. This means you can ping the big three at the following URLs:

• MSN: http://search.live.com/ ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
• Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search. http://www.google.com/ webmasters/sitemaps/ ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

What does this mean?

First, it’s interesting that users get to tell a search engine what to search, how to index, and what’s been updated. Decoding that information used to be the sole responsibility of the search crawler–now it’s a webmaster’s configuration. Second, it’s a unified format that all the search engines can read. Perhaps there will now be better indexing from #2 Yahoo and #3 MSN as they try to catch up with Google. Whatever happens, more traffic is good for us bloggers

You don’t let me leave a comment without registering, so I’m not going to. Trackbacks are so much prettier, no?

Anyway, you tell your publishers:

Don;t manipulate our ad code. We;re flexible and already offer plenty of choices.

I have to say that’s completely nonsensical. I never used your ad code when I ran YPN ads. It was just too limiting and broken. It didn’t validate because you didn’t declare the script mime type as “text/javascript.” So, I added that to the ads myself. Then, your color picker just sucked, so I hand coded the rest of my colors. If you’ve got a problem with that, I would recommend that all your publishers drop you on moral principle. Otherwise, you might want to clarify the above statement.

What you probably meant to say is something like:

You must include the ad code from our servers, but you can customize the rest of the javascript on your site.

Wouldn’t a statement like that make more sense? It might make publishers more comfortable, too.