Yahoo, local results, and search value

One factor in the yahoo search algorithm seems to be where your server is located. If you want to test this, search for “dissurion” in yahoo.com and yahoo.fr. The latter one is geographically closest to my server. With the higher importance of location, less importance is set on the keywords in an url, it seems.

Now, I for one don’t like this splitting up the web according to geo-location. Note that google also has this to a lesser degree (which I will rant about in another post). I just want the most relevant results for my search, not the closest to home.

Perhaps the reason for this is commercial. Say you are looking for reviews on a book and you are located in England. Then it’s in your and especially amazon’s interest that amazon.co.uk shows up above amazon.com. For advertisers it’s a waste of resources if they show up in a search where the person that is looking for something will, with 99% certainty, buy somewhere else (closer to home). The person from England encountering an amazon.com book might visit this site, only to order it on amazon.co.uk later. So from that perspective localised results make sense.

But the internet isn’t all about buying and selling things. A large part of it is. But most of it is information. At least when I search. And when I do that, I want the best info for my search. And I wont get that best info if local sites are stuffed on the first pages of results when there are better ones out there.

Maybe I am old-fashioned. Maybe getting information has lost it’s first place to commercialism.But I like to be informed before I buy. So I’ll have to get that information first, buy next.