Yahoo! 360 chugs along slowly

An update...Two weeks ago, Yahoo! 360 had just under 3,000 members. Today it has 5,750. That's members of any kind. Including people like me who don't actively maintain their 360 page. So far, Yahoo! 360 is not a great success...

If the same ratio on MSN spaces applied, that would mean around 100 members who update their entries daily. A facile comparison, of course, just a bit of interesting trivia.

Update: some comments by reader Scott Villarosa reminded me of the way I used to estimate blogger membership. This search returns 30,000 members. However, only 1,000 show up. Exactly 1,000, which does not sound right. This kind of Google search is not very accurate because it takes time for all these pages to show up on Google, if at all, and because there are a number issues around the declared counted numbers returned by Google. So, it's just another number.

I was hoping to suggest that only 1,000 results show up because that's how many profiles Google has indexed. But you also only get 1,000 results if you do the same search for "news" or "cars", which is obviously wrong. How come? Conspiratorially, Yahoo! reports 192,000 results but only shows 979. Yahoo! does the same cutting off at 1,000 for "news" and "cars", so clearly this is not reliable.

Whatever the exact number, it still seems to suggest Yahoo! 360 is small (although there is a big gap between the lowest and highest number), but I find it interesting to try and triangulate the right answer. If it is 192,000, as Yahoo! search vaguely suggests, that is a bit more respectable. But it does beg the question, why can I not find these people when using 360's own search? Perhaps 187,000 members have not filled in their age details. That seems a bit high. Certainly, one would hope that 360 search indexes all the members, not just 5k out of 192k.

Comments

[Scott Villarosa]

How do you know about the numbers? Are they available to Joe Public?

[James MacAonghus]

Yes it is public: you can search for all members aged 1 to 99.