Yahoo! recently expanded their search engine service and now offers users the ability to access information that Yahoo! has about a site's online presence. You can see which sites and sub-pages are indexed by Yahoo! Search, track sites that link into a webpage, and view the most popular pages from any site.
The Site Explorer is Yahoo!’s latest strategy in an attempt to increase the quality of their search engine to compete with Google. Matt Mayernik, VP Technology of Hudson Horizons, has been using and testing Yahoo!’s Site Explorer over the past few weeks. His experience with the new service so far has been positive. Mr. Mayernik states, “Yahoo! Site Explorer is Yahoo!'s version of Google Sitemaps. The service allows webmasters the ability to gather more information about the status of their website in the Yahoo! search index. Yahoo! has developed an API that allows developers to download reports about their site, a very useful feature. I feel the new application is an enormous step forward for Yahoo! and will most likely provide a valuable resource for webmasters in the future.”
The new Yahoo! Site Explorer can be used to:
* Find which sub-pages within a URL are indexed by Yahoo!
* Find pages that link to that site or any page. (in-links)
* Submit and track feeds for your sites.
If you are exploring a site you have authenticated, you can see additional information about the site URLs, such as:
* Sub-domains from the site known to Yahoo!
* Last crawled date of your site's URLs.
* Language detected for the site's URLs.
* Additional details on the status of your site feeds, such as when they were last submitted and processed.
Exploring a site is as easy as doing a web search but instead of entering a "query term" you will enter a site's URL. A Site Explorer search will not return the same results that a web search would. Instead, Site Explorer uses the URL you submit to return particular information related to the structure of that URL in the Yahoo! Search database and on the Web.
If you’re interested in submitting a feed, you can submit them through their FREE Search Page or through their Site Explorer API. They support the following feed submission formats: RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 or a text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt. The filename for a compressed file must be: urllist.txt.gz.
You can track the feeds for any site that you have submitted to Yahoo! Search once you register the site with them. You can also see more detailed information including the status, last processed date, and last submitted date for the feed, once you authenticate a site.
Yahoo!’s Site Explorer is their latest attempt to improve Yahoo! Search to become a stronger competitor in the race for the most widely used search engine on the Internet. Currently Google is estimated to receive 40% of all searches performed online, with Yahoo! at a close second with 30%, followed by MSN with 16%. Will the new Site Explorer help Yahoo! to improve their search engine and take more of a hold in the search engine market? In my opinion, this is a positive start.
I believe Yahoo! is on the right track and believe it or not, I think Yahoo! has a chance to surpass Google within the next three years. Is this possible? Let’s place our bets!
Hudson Horizons is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses.
Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be "The New Light for e-Business."
By offering new, innovative and extremely competitive products and solutions to our customers, we provide better ways to run and operate their business online.
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