Some of you already know about my bogus Bay Leaves site. Perhaps you've noticed the links here and from many of the pages on my main website. It's sort of a joke and an experiment in progress, and you can read an explanation here.

A couple of weeks after starting this little experiment, I was able to promote the bay leaf page to the number one result when you searched Google or Yahoo for "bay leaves." Yahoo was using Google as their search engine, so I really only had to pay attention to Google and Yahoo would follow. The site peaked at about 19 hits a day, then settled down to a steady 15 hits a day. That's probably not bad at all for a site about something as inane as bay leaves.

But a week ago, on February 17, Yahoo pulled the plug on Google and substituted their own search engine. For reasons I have not been able to figure out, the new Yahoo search engine does not index my bay leaf page, nor does there seem to be an obvious place to submit a site (oh, it's probably there somewhere, I know). The number of hits per day has dropped to about 9, so I'm probably losing about one third of the regular bay leaf traffic because of the search engine change.

Google is still the king of the search engines, but the new Yahoo engine isn't too bad. For a lot of the searches I try on both engines, Yahoo often gives me a few more results than Google. I'm sure they've purposely fixed their engine specifically to do that, as they're trying to show how good they are, so perhaps they aren't as efficient as Google at omitting similar result pages and borderline matches. You'd think they would make it pretty easy to get new pages on their index, too, just to show how they're growing faster than Google.

So why, then, doesn't my bay leaf page show up at all on their search engine? My index page for that site does show up, so it's not because Yahoo has turned its back on the site's host. Did I do something odd on that page that sent up a red flag for Yahoo's spider program? Is Yahoo smart enough to know the page is really a joke? Do I need to get more websites to link to the page?

Nah, I don't think so. If I didn't have enough links, I'd just be lower in the ranking, not completely absent. There's nothing particularly odd about the page, and I doubt Yahoo's spider can judge my page ineligible because of its bogus content. But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I've got a couple of other ideas to try, right after I finish off another dish of sweet laurel sorbet, so keep watching for next bay leaf update.