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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the return-of-the-fisher-king dept.

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.

5 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. When to use Google or Yahoo! by KC8SWY · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  2. Re:ha! by heytal · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Ya-who? by Nick+Harkin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  4. Re:pah, yahoo.com is totally useless by Jetifi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Look at it from their perspective by SanLouBlues · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 . . .