Today I made my annual trip to Yahoo.com to see if it was shut down yet. The site is still up, it is just plastered with ads. The home page is plastered with ads which literally take you to fake news sites and sites which attempt to infect your computer, and the search results pages have a massive amount of ads which are, of course, in my opinion deceptively placed in an effort to trick people into thinking they are organic results to maximize clicks. Still, I waded through what I feel is a total dumpster fire in an attempt to see if there was anything new. There was, and it is a feature called “Feel-Good Results”.
Yahoo hasn’t explained what this is and nobody else on the Internet has documented it, so I’ll give it a whirl.
What are “Feel-Good Results”?
I believe “Feel-Good Results” are Yahoo’s effort to highlight web content related to the user’s search query. Google rolled out a very similar feature in 2018 called “Interesting Finds”.
Yahoo usually follows suit. However, in this case, the feature doesn’t appear ready for prime time. To me it looks like an engineer thought “Well, it’s right about 50% of the time…”, then shrugged their shoulders and left “Feel-Good Results” the way that it is.
For example, you would think that searching for “German Shepherd Rescue” should return a list of nearby rescue groups which focus on rehabilitating German Shepherd Dogs. Well, not at Yahoo; at Yahoo you get “Feel-Good Results” about dogs chasing squirrels…
Yeah, you really can’t make this stuff up:
At least the other results are stories which are indeed related to German Shepherd Dogs being rescued…
Other “Feel-Good Results” are very bizarre. Like, for “sneakers”. If I search for sneakers – I expect some ads for sneakers, a list of shoe stores near me, then some organic search results for sneakers. Well, not at Yahoo:
Optimizing Content for “Feel-Good Results”?
Normally the next section of my article would be about optimizing your content for this new search feature. However, I highly doubt it would drive a significant amount of traffic, and, Yahoo has missed the boat here when it comes to searcher intent. Like, this is some really random stuff – as search for “sneakers” gives me articles about sneakers becoming art – someone taking their kids somewhere, and a page about sneakers which is just a big page of affiliate ads.
At this point in time, I am seeing no correlation between content displayed in “Feel-Good Results” and organic rankings, and the pages displaying in Feel Good Results are not always from news sites.
In this case, your guess is as good as mine, however, I would be willing to bet that even Yahoo doesn’t know what the heck is going on with the algorithm.
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