Google Vs. Yahoo: When We Last Met...

I-R-Baboon writes "The New York Times has this article on the battle between the once #1 Yahoo and the current champion and #1 Google. Yahoo wants it's throne back and is ready to throw the gloves off and mix it up with Google. But can the uncluttering of their page, toning down the ads, and using some features not currently offered on Google give them their title back?" Of course, Yahoo! will have to get in line behind Microsoft as well.

Comments

nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer: NO.

At this point they not only need to match, they need to do better. And I don't see Yahoo to be the ones to do that.

Re:nope.

[yivi]

I went to Yahoo's front page just now (first time in a LONG time I'd been there) and what did I get: jobs, chat, travel, ads, directories, ads, news, ads, groups, ads... It's a mess, frankly

While I agree, you were looking at the /old/ Yahoo!. There is a link there pointing to the /New/ Yahoo! search, which is way cleaner.

You should check this.

While better than the old Y!, I still trust in Google to continue being King of the Hill for a while.

Making life easier

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'm on a windows system fairly often and I find google is appropriate for about 90% of the web searching I do. But checking results against other engines comes in handy sometimes.

I like to use the Lookerup search tool. It makes life a lot easier than the google toolbar and the tonnes of horrible software Yahoo installs to give you a better, "yahoo experience".

Also, lookerup comes with a bunch of utilities I use a lot - but mostly it just makes web searching faster when I'm working on documents etc, and it allows you to pick between search engines you can specify really quickly. So when yahoo does beat out google (lol, yeah right) I'll just setup lookerup to query yahoo first.

-john

RTFA.

[Haeleth]

Yahoo owns Inktomi, but, according to the NY Times article, still uses Google's index at present.

When to use Google or Yahoo!

[KC8SWY]

All search engines/technologies have their own purpose.

If I am looking for a companies website and it isn't companywebsite.com, I would use yahoo and enter the company name. Once in a while It works for topic searches.

If I am doing a general search, I used to use Excite or Lycos. I have moved to google as my search engine of choice for a few reasons.

1. Google searches embedded formats (PDF, MSWord, Etc.)
2. Google is fast and clean
3. Free
4. Google has cached versions of pages for when a site has been /.'ed.
5. Google's rankings are not based on keywords but rather who links to the site.
6. Picture search
7. News search
8. Usenet search
9. Preferences for setting # of results p/page

Yahoo! has a long way to go despite the extra services they offer (chat, games, auctions).

Re:ha!

[heytal]

And do you think that yahoo has not thought about it ?

check out http://search.yahoo.com. It's a look and feel copied from Google, but just that the tabs are on the side, and not at the top of the search box.

Re:Ya-who?

[Nick Harkin]

and a little register hack which allows me to type

G ........

in my IE search bar to search for ....... on google. :P


REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g] @="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe= UTF-8&q=%s"

just copy and paste that into a notepad doc, and save as a .reg

Re:Google Vs. Yahoo vs. MS

[uhmmmm]

Just remember, google is now a noun and a verb, not just a number.

Sure, "google" is now a noun and a verb, but it was never a number - "googol" is.

Re:Ya-who?

[operagost]

You can also set it so that IE searches in Google instead of worthless MSN by default. As usual for MS products, it requires several nonintuitive steps.

Open the Search pane.

Click Customize.

Click Autosearch settings.

Choose Google Sites.

Weird results from Inktomi

[twelveinchbrain]

According to the article, Inktomi provides search results that are "every bit as good as those of Google". I tried a comparison, and got a strange result when searching for "bling bling" on HotBot, using the Inktomi index. Try it for yourself, and see if you can explain the #1 result.

yahoo more like google? puh-LEEZE.

[AyeRoxor!]

I haven't been to yahoo in AGES, but I just stopped by. The front screen is so cluttered with "news" and "contests" and advertisements that I actually had to look all over the page to find where the search engine part was. Bam! That's all it takes for me to know that yahoo is always going to be a "walking commercial" and not a professional utility.

my beef against Yahoo

[turambar386]

If you look in their Opposing Views of Scientology section, you will find no mention of Operation Clambake, the most important web site devoted to revealing the truth about the cult.

Why?

Re:pah, yahoo.com is totally useless

[Jetifi]

Google's HTML is stripped down, but the HTTP response headers on the main page are the bare minimum.

Using livehttpheaders on the Google logo shows these HTTP headers in the 200 OK:

Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 02:32:25 GMT

Expires: Sun, 17 Jan 2038 19:14:07 GMT

(The Expires header is probably a round number in the UNIX date format.) What this does is instructs every proxy server, squid and browser cache between you and Google not to bother re-downloading the image until 2038. Of course, you can probably make the browser override that.

Look at it from their perspective

[SanLouBlues]

Without even considering end-user benefits, the extreme space-saving efforts still make sense. Sure, google might serve 9k of data to each user. But if they were serving 10k instead, and they got 200 million hits a day, that's 200GB of bandwidth saved daily. And, whoever you get your connection from, that's a few bucks . . .

When I think of Yahoo...

[Le Marteau]

what immediatly comes to mind is Jonathan Swift's descriptions of Yahoos in Gulliver's Travels, namely:

"A yahoo is a vile and savage creature, filthy and with unpleasant habits..." (from Wikipedia) ... and that feeling is not pleasant and certainly does not endear me to their site.