Ever since Google got popular, I began to personally dislike how Google indexes pages mainly due to the fact that Google is unable or unwilling to properly discern the reasons behind why someone may search on my name. In other words: If I, or anyone else, searches for my name, the first thing that should show up is the homepage of my website (this of course excludes celebrities and as much as I may want to think I am one, I certainly am not). However, a search for my name in actuality shows this on Google:

This, sadly, is an improvement from years ago when another site would rank above mine. Two potentially main reasons as to why: My main site does not include my name and that the old MC99 page probably has some links helping it to rank well. Sadly, I think after this post gets indexed, it will likely rank in position 1.

Let’s compare to how MSN and Yahoo do their indexing while we’re at it:

Done properly, now Yahoo:

What impresses me sometimes about Yahoo is that the results make common sense: What do people searching about someone want to know? Do they have a website? Check. Can I quickly contact them via social networking sites? Check.

So what search engine do I use? Google. Part of the reason entails the annoyance of some many things on Yahoo’s homepage, part of it is really that although Yahoo does show results with some common sense, Google is still far better than anything else out there with breadth, depth, and relevance of information for terms that everyone else is looking for.