Don’t Ask Jeeves, He Doesn’t Know

Happy New Year!

I just did a search on Ask Jeeves to test a customer’s keyword/website placement results compared to Yahoo’s. Ask Jeeves’ results show a PDF file we removed from the customer’s website months ago.

Clicking on the search result I get the following error: “Not Found – The requested URL /pdf/HOW_TO_WRITE.pdf was not found on this server.” Why bother telling me this? This error or link to the error should never show up in the search results. Ask Jeeves is not being very helpful if they’re giving me dead links.

Ask Jeeves Gives Inaccurate Results

The only reason why Ask Jeeves still has this file indexed is because they’ve failed to re-index our customer’s website. What’s the point of using a search engine, when it fails to give accurate results? Ask Jeeves has got some work to do before I rely on their searches.

It’s important for a search engine to provide quality results. It’s their job. Broken links don’t fall into this category. There’s a reason why Google is #1.

Note: Obviously no two search engines are alike, so here are a couple of websites that allow you to compare your search results from various search engines:

– Thumbshots Ranking Tool

– Jux2

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out!”