Spam, Spam and more Spam! ★
My blog, my email inbox, and just about every service I have subscribed to that involves posting comments has spam and plenty of it. The only preventive measure is CAPTCHA which generates word-verification images which are so difficult to decipher that I have almost finally decided a new spam-prevention measure, like the one currently implemented in revieware but only better after I am done with the board exams. That is March 22nd, my Maths exam. The next exam is Computer Science so I can give myself a lot of time on the computer during the 12 days of study leave.
I don’t want to sound like Ankur Banerjee(aka the Great Quizzard) but of lately, Google hasn’t been giving me results like Yahoo has been. Precision has certainly reduced, and the time taken to index a site is also way too much. When I added my blog to Yahoo search it had indexed it the next moment, and I was able to search throughout my archives. Google is certainly faster than Yahoo but hey in the broadband generation who cares anyway?
Yahoo has also introduced a service which I took note of only today. It’s called Yahoo! Site Explorer which is rather good as it lets us track any website we like, with a list of any page-specific changes made to that particular website. Well organised display. Awesome, I should say.
Aha! Victory at last! I’d always said that Yahoo indexes faster and gives me better results. And yes, even I admit that Google IS faster, but as you said, who cares in a broadband world anyway!
I might also point out here, the reason why Yahoo is slower is that they’ve less datacenters, and they also uses more complicated search result URLs. Compare that to Google which uses simpler ones, and thus allows spammers to disguise redirects to their site using Google Search URLs. Read Google Operating System’s post on this one.
When it comes to spam filtering in emails, I find Google to be the clear winner. I have a whole lot more spam in my Yahoo email address which I haven’t even given to many people.
But google does has a more ‘aggressive’ filter, hence it filters more mails. I have seen many mails in my Spam folder which should not have been there. I still check my spam folder (which gets hundreds daily :( ), thus the whole funda of filtering is nulled. Yahoo’s mail also looks much better..
Gmail is still my primary mail service. I guess basicalluy because it is a real pain to change ids, plus due to the label feature in Gmail….