Google vs Yahoo
April 27th, 2006
Google is clearly the better search engine overall - I've never had a problem with it. That was until I decided to syndicate some of its news feeds. Google has taken it upon themselves to provide their newsfeeds in html format. And its not even good HTML. Each item is packed with tables, and font tags where it would be simpler to just provide these news snippets as plain text. There is more than enough allowance in the RSS 2.0 specifications to allow for images to be placed outside the description, yet they fall down on this part. You'll find images placed besides news articles that are sometimes hardly relevant.
I did try spending some time to clean up the feeds, using some regular expressions and strip_tags(). In the end however, it proved fruitless. I decided to look elsewhere for my RSS, and happeend across Yahoo News. They provide the RSS feeds in plain text, and it works perfectly.
A note to Google: CDATA is there for a reason - place your HTML in there, and give us plain text in the RSS item descriptions!
Some useful information.
Rant Over!
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2 Comments Add your own
1. civ | April 27th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
"Google is clearly the better search engine overall"
Based on what?
2. Khalid | April 28th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Based upon research that I should've put up in the post - thanks for pointing that out…
http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451
Although the figures are for Nov 2005, Google shows almost double the amonunt of search volume than Yahoo.
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