Monday, September 29, 2008

Yahoo! Makes Backdoor Entry In Google Search Results via their Glue Pages

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/yahoo-glue-backdoor-entry-into-google-search/4653/

Yahoo Glue is an interesting tool for searching information on the web – type in a query and you get results from sources like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, news, etc. on a single page.

yahoo glue pages

When you perform a search on Yahoo! Glue, the results page has a very clean URL structure something on the lines of Wikipedia. For instance, a search for ‘delhi’ would show the following page:

http://in.glue.yahoo.com/page/delhi

You can substitute ‘delhi’ in the above URL with another term (say madonna) to see the corresponding Glue page.

http://in.glue.yahoo.com/page/madonna

The surprising part is that these ‘yahoo! glue pages’, which clearly fall in the category of auto-generated content, now rank in Google search pages. In fact, there are at least 143,000 ‘glues’ that are indexed by Google – that’s more than knol.

google-glue

So how did Google discover all these ‘glues’? After some digging, I came across this page that is probably a directory of search queries and may been constructed for other search engines to find and crawl all these ‘virtual’ pages hosted on Yahoo! Glue.

Related: How to Enhance Yahoo! Search Results

Yahoo! Makes Backdoor Entry In Google Search Results via their Glue Pages - Digital Inspiration