MSN bot is going to eat Yahoo! botI read it on newspapers and the news are on the net, a big OPA from Micro$oft to buy Yahoo! and become a serious contender against Google for the search engines market .
I'm not writing about this financial argument (but if they send me a millipercent of that OPA I would be very happy
) but about my experience as the webmaster of Posetteforever with those search engines.
If you go to google and search "Posette" we are (and we deserve to be
) in first position 
.
Same if you go to MSN even if the results look strange, with the title truncated
On Yahoo! the results are not consistent: Today a topic from here about adolescent Posette is in first place and another in the second place but not the main page. Yesterday we were not even listed. if you go to a localized yahoo, like yahoo.it and search for "Posette" you get as the first result my very old yahoo group that I created before building this site, so I think that one of the way yahoo is made is to give different results for the localized search engines pages and to kick up their own pages (yahoo groups).
Google has a pagerank, you can see it if you install their bar or go to some sites that show it , it goes from 0 to 10 like at school, 10 means that you site is linked and visited by hordes of people every day. We had inconsistent results from this rank, from 1 to 3 , then 2 and now again 3 (and hoping for more) until I found the way the search engine is programmed (exactly I found nothing, I simply read specialized sites
) and modified the code accordingly , things like not having the same content on different addresses on the same site (i installed a "no duplication" mod) or knowing that for a spider "posetteforever.com" is not the same of "www.posetteofrever.com" they are seen like two different sites, so I modified the configuration of the site so that everything goes to www.posetteforever.com even if you type it without "www" or use the direct IP, 208.109.45.207, I also modified the redirection of the other domain name and IP addresses that point here (posette.com , davideclerici.com) giving a "301, moved permanently" so that even the old links or the links without the "www" before "posetteforever.com" are seen by spiders like they are pointing here, raising up a little our ranking. All this because the stats show that 30% of the visitors of the site come here after a journey on a search engine 
...
While I can understand the reasons behind Google (*munching candies*) bot I just can't understand why we go up and down on Yahoo!
or MSN if not that they have a worse algorythm and programming so my opinion is that even if Bill Gate$ will buy Yahoo! not much will change...
Another note. I read that Yahoo! made an agreement with the Chinese government in order to use their services in that country (highly censored) and that they gave them the names of dissident journalists that were their costumers that now are in prison (with Bubba's chinese cousin). Sometimes we're bumped by a yahoo bot from China and also by chinese bots (not talking of chinese spammers
, but it's another story) . I went to the search page of these bots, wrote "Posette" or "posetteforever" and nothing appeared about us even if they are sucking the bandwidth here for no apparent reason. Even if we tacitly never spoke of politic I'm really tempted to ban those bots...
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) What can we do, as I said, it's complicated 
