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Searching for directory sites: Google falls for Yahoo! Partial retraction Hardin MD Notes, Sept 12, 2000 Eric Rumsey eric-rumsey@uiowa.edu Sep 14 -- I just got a note from Steve Foote, of MedWebPlus, that explains the fall of MedWebPlus in Google rankings -- He says that last Spring they "blocked robots from accessing MedWebPlus in a (probably misguided) attempt to improve performance." They are now reversing this, so that robots will be able to find them. My humble apologies, to readers, and to Google, for suggesting that Google was purposely lowering non-Yahoo directories in their rankings. I should have run the article by Steve Foote before publishing. So half of my argument is wrong, but my data on Yahoo's rise in Google rankings still holds. In refuting my article, Google reportedly says that they are now crawling *all* of Yahoo! as part of their agreement, which might have changed rankings. If Google is changing the way they're treating Yahoo! in rankings, they should say something about it. Return to article The subject words searched in Google are: anesthesiology cardiology dermatology gastroenterology geriatrics hematology nephrology urology neurology neurosciences obstetrics gynecology ophthalmology orthopedics otolaryngology pathology pediatrics pharmacy psychiatry rheumatology audiology toxicology Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa Please send comments to hardin-webmaster@uiowa.edu The URL for this page is http://www.lib.uiowa.edu Last updated Last updated Tuesday, Oct 10, 2000 [13605]