Yahoo! Switches Search Engines

Giorgio Baresi writes "As several sources are reporting, Yahoo! in the last hours dumped Google and rolled out a brand new search engine mainly based on Inktomi search technology and Overture sponsored results. On Monday Yahoo! also launched its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp", which replaced former "Inktomi Slurp". Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun!"

Comments

The search engine war has begun?

[MullerMn]

I think you mean, "Begun, the search engine war has.".

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[GuyinVA]

That would be nice. Maybe now they can pull up something relevant to what I searched for in the first place.

How can you speak if you haven't got a brain?

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Darth23]

Master, I have to admit, without the Google Troopers this would not have been a victory.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[paranode]

Does a Star Wars pun really rate that high of a mod?

Star Wars leads to quotes.. quotes lead to puns...

Puns lead to funny mods.

Much to learn, have you.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Derkec]

The sad thing is that this was the first thing I thought of when I red that line as well.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[wthynot]

Move over Yoda--Ian McKellen is the greatest War Announcer of our time, not you. :)

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[stephenisu]

That would be nice. Maybe now they can pull up something relevant to what I searched for in the first place.

Not likely, Overture (I love these guys, they are making me rich) lets you BUY the top spots without letting the user know it. Google, on the other hand only sells side bar positions. Darn those google people and their ethics (no wonder MS couldn't buy them...)

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[dealsites]

For real. I've been running dealsites.net for a while can hardly get any traffic from the search engines. My site has a lot of content, but for some reason the search bots rarely hit my site. What can I do to fix that? I've got some links to my site, but how else can I get more traffic if I can't get into the search engines? The word-of-mouth doesn't travel too fast!

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Ian McKellen?

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[TopShelf]

And not Christopher Lee???

I can just see the Yahoo CEO addressing his legions of web crawlers, proclaiming, "A New Power is rising! It's victory is at hand."

There will be no IPO for Google...

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just looked at your site. Besides being rather lame, what the hell do you expect people to search for that would bring your site up? Yeah, there's lots of content, but try putting some original content out there. It's all product names dufus.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this before ..... seems to me that this was a search engine created by the folks at ErieX. Now how ironic is it that Ya"hell" has unleashed a "new" search engine thats not so new.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[justforjest]

Er... Just what's IPO?

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose this is the main content of you site?

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[akalashnikova47]

I happen to have been looking at access logs today

I thought I'd add what I found:

66.77.73.98 - - [10/Feb/2004:22:40:14 -0700] "Page requested" "Yahoo-MMCrawler/3.x (mm dash crawler at trd dot overture dot com)"

Where Page requested was the only Item I changed. Interesting. I guess it wasn't a mistake.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[dealsites]

This is the content the visitors come for.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Anonymous Coward]

When will people learn that Google does sell the top places of the searches results. Are all you people color blind or can you see the Ad Words on top of the search results?

Sometimes I feel too many people give Google too much credit. They are just another search engine looking to make money. Quit thinking they are God.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[$andeep]

atleast this works
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=stuff+that+matter s&fr=fp-pull-web-t&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt
http://www.google.com/search?q=stuff+that+matters& ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&met a=

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[Elbow Macaroni]

I don't know why but I have a feeling that Yahoo's is going to suck. Just something about that stupid name, Inktomi. That name just pisses me off for some reason.

Oh I know why, because they don't take free submissions.

Google is the best, the best, the best, the best, Not like all the rest - because it is the best...YEAH GOOGLE!

(Sorry about that, I feel better now.)

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[plj]

I guess you are one of the following:
a) non-native English speaker
b) new here
c) both

Well, I belong to category "a" myself, but as a rather regular slashdotter I've got a lesson that Acronym Finder is your friend.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[wthynot]

Gah! Very funny(?) Well, in case you're not kidding and too lazy to google for it, these (overly) dramatic quotes are his (not sure if they're 100% accurate):

LOTR:TTT - Gandalf - "The battle of Helm's Deep is over, but the battle for Middle Earth has just begun."

X2: X-Men United - Magneto - "War has begun..."

Re:The search engine war has begun?

[justforjest]

c) and I had checked with Acronym finder... I was hoping somebody would tell me whats the big deal about an Initial Public offering anyway...

is it just me...

[glen604]

or does a webcrawler named "slurp" sound like something more appropriate for booble.com?

Re:is it just me...

[LnxAddct]

Well I think this whole switch has more to do with naming issues and marketing rather then providing whats best for the customer. Afterall, Yahoo! used to have commercials all the time saying "Do you Yahoo!?" however noone started saying, "Oh I don't know this, I'll go yahoo for it". But people all the time say I'll google for it, and I've never seen a google commercial.If they continue using google then there attempts at getting people to make yahoo a verb are pointless. Either way Yahoo isn't all that great and never was.
Regards,
Steve

Re:is it just me...

[quonsar]

But people all the time say I'll google for it

no, not really. people in your circle certainly, but not people in general! a friend of mine who does web stuff is always dealing with "tech clueless" executive types, guys who have the latest and greatest box on the credenza which they use to play solitaire and type a letter in Word now and then, before calling the secretary in to spell-check and print it because he doesn't know the menus. smart guys generally, but focused on what they do, not on being internet savvy. for some of these guys, learning to use google is like a eureka moment - the web suddenly makes sense to them. in my experience, when saying something like "i'll google it" around people who aren't net jocks, i get funny looks.

Re:is it just me...

[grantham]

That's funny, a couple of hours ago, I heard a sports talk radio host (Tony Kornheiser) use google as a verb when telling his assistant to look something up. This from a guy who refers to computers as "e-mail machines".

Re:is it just me...

[Elbow Macaroni]

Yahoo never was a search engine it was a directory. Staffed by legions of monkeys living underground on the planet Mars.

I hear that ebay outsources to those same monkeys too.

Surely you mean

[gowen]

"Begun the search engine war has!"

(If Yoda great Jedi Master is, why proper sentence construct can he not, eh?)

Re:Surely you mean

[DrSkwid]

Reverse Polish Notation, he speaks in.

Re:Surely you mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure he's not just pushing clauses onto a stack, waiting for the listener to pop them off again into English.

Re:Surely you mean

[cybermace5]

No no, you ended the sentence with a preposition. A more accurate phrasing would be:

"Reverse Polish Notation, in which he speaks."

Re:Surely you mean

[NonSequor]

The problem with this rule is that in common usage, prepositions often follow verbs to form a sort of ad-hoc compound verb. Other languages have similar constructions except they use the preposition as a prefix to form a single word. Attempts to rearrange sentences ending in these pseudo-compound verbs end up being awkward.

In fact, "Reverse Polish Notation, in which he speaks." is a sentence fragment. "In which he speaks" is a clause modifying "Reverse Polish Notation."

Re:Surely you mean

[cybermace5]

Of course it's fractured English. I'm a fellow Grammar Nazi. *secret handshake* My comment was comparing the sentence structure to Reverse Polish Notation, not standard English.

Re:Surely you mean

[Tackhead]

> No no, you ended the sentence with a preposition. A more accurate phrasing would be:
>
> "Reverse Polish Notation, in which he speaks."

"In days of Warsaw Pact, he spoke in Reverse Polish Notation!"

Re:Surely you mean

[cluckshot]

Obviously we need to reverse the Polish?

I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[The One KEA]

Yahoo has been talking about dumping Google for a real long time now, so I doubt Google is really surprised. Besides, with the recent update to their index that they just made, I have a feeling that Google is not going to succumb just yet.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[garcia]

Of course it's not a major problem. I know very few people that still use Yahoo as their first choice in search engines (and I am not talking about computer saavy people either).

My mother uses the Google toolbar and knew about it w/o me telling her. My father refuses to use anything other than Google as his homepage.

My number one reason for believing that Google is the all important, #1 search engine: My girlfriend's parents said, "I'll just google for it." at dinner one night (and this is a family where they have a shortcut to every file on the desktop and they use AOL 6.0).

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[bad-badtz-maru]

I dunno, these new Yahoo/Inktomi results are looking pretty sharp compared to google.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[hendridm]

On a related note, I was at my parents home this weekend. They like to use Yahoo for their searching. No problem, but they were complaining of popups. I decided to install the Google toolbar for them. The thought crossed my mind to install the Yahoo toolbar, since they prefer Yahoo, however, it came down to a matter of trust. When Google says they're not going to resell my information or track my moves, they've given me no reason to disbelieve them. But seeing some of the ads on Yahoo makes me feel they're willing to do anything for an extra click. I appreciate that they're in the business to make money, just as Google is, but Google just makes me feel more comfortable about it.

Not a big deal either, since there's a goof chance my parents won't take notice the new bar anyway ;)

It is sad that you have to question every motive and move you make on the Internet thanks to all the toxic waste that is present. One wrong subscription and your inbox is hosed. I made that mistake the other day. Fortunately, I used a throw-away e-mail address so the damage was minimal.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[zach_smith]

If you really care whether or not they track you, then you should read about the cookie Google sets with a unique ID number. I personally don't care, but it would be interesting to have access to such data if it exists.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Popageorgio]

Yahoo has far more traffic than Google: Alexa says so.

But under 10% of Yahoo's traffic goes to their search sections: Again, Alexa.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[martijnd]

My (limited) observation is that Googles dominance is limited to the area they are playing in.

My European websites obtain 90% of their hits from Google.

My Chinese/Japanese language sites obtain 90% of their hits from the local Yahoo.

The browser wars are far from over outside of the ASCII 1-128 area.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Reglar_Joe]

>My girlfriend's parents said, "I'll just google for it." Google's problem with this is once your product name is used as a verb you begin losing your rights. Think of Xerox, for example. It doesn't help Google at all to become generic and that's why I do a Google search.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[naoiseo]

No need to be so warm & fuzzy with Google. That toolbar they distribute, that 'sends information back to google' -- well, SEOs have realized that you can view a web-page that google does not have indexed, with their toolbar installed, and a few minutes later the googlebot will come along.

Google claims they do not do this, and that sites are only indexed via incoming links. Privacy issues worthy of note. webmasterworld thread on the topic

Somebody isn't telling the truth, and I doubt it's the log files. Point is, left hand and right hand are not familiar with eachother, even in the land of making order from chaos, ye ole googleplex.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[claar]

You made a good decision not installing the Yahoo search bar. I haven't bothered to read why exactly, but the Spybot -- Search & Destroy software labels it and/or its components as spyware.

For some reason, whenever I run across machines that have the Yahoo Search bar, this lovely "Search Assistant" thing that gives extra pop up windows when searching is on the machines as well..

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[LearnToSpell]

When Google says they're not going to resell my information or track my moves, they've given me no reason to disbelieve them.

Google has logs of every search ever run. According to your paranoia level, you may want to react accordingly.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[TwistedGreen]

But doesn't google (v.) mean to search with Google (n.)? It's a testament to the vast popularity of Google, not the loss of their trademark. There's a difference here: most kleenex you use isn't Kleenex-brand kleenex, but who would say they're going to google with Yahoo?

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have my IP address, so I don't understand why anyone would care.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[phatsharpie]

Actually, according to the pages you posted, only about 5% of Yahoo! users go to http://search.yahoo.com .

Also, according to Alexa's ranking of top 100 sites, Google actually have 4 seperate entries because of its local versions. Specifically, Google (main), Google UK, Google Canada, and Google Australia. I don't know how much Google's ranking can be boosted if its parts are summed together.

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=l an g&lang=en

-B

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Pop-ups? How quaint. ;)

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[rotciv86]

Yahoo is also the content provider for SBC/Ameritech DSL, that could account for the higher volume of traffic.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[WarderDot]

"I'll just google for it" sounds much better than "I'll just yahoo for it"

"Yahoo" is expressed with a feeling of excitement. What's so excited about using a search engine??

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Popageorgio]

Good points. But where I failed to include several Google domains, I did notice the Yahoo search subdomains other than search.yahoo.com (e.g. imagesearch.yahoo.com; websearch.yahoo.com)

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[netik]

I used to work at Inktomi. Yahoo did a major power play in that they:

1) Dumped Inktomi in favor of google.
2) Told Inktomi it was "just trying google out" and that they would "eventunally return to Inktomi"
3) Continued this leading-on of Inktomi until Inktomi's shares fell to nothing
4) Bought up Inktomi when they were weak
5) Switched back to Inktomi's software when they were good and ready

I bet -nothing- has changed between Yahoo! Slurp and Inktomi Slurp. Yahoo doesn't have the expertise to write search engine software like Inktomi, and they're just leveraging the software they have on hand.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yahoo" is also meant to mean "moron"

(ie: those yahoos down in Accounting)

So maybe it should be changed to "I'll just ask those yahoos for it"

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[harmonica]

I know very few people that still use Yahoo as their first choice in search engines (and I am not talking about computer saavy people either).

Nonetheless, among search engines it's second only to Google in driving traffic to my site (ok, some people block the referrer, but not many). It isn't much, but it beats the rest of the crowd (Google brings ~45% of all traffic, Yahoo 3.4%, then MSN with 1.5%).

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Naffer]

Ha, everyone used to work for Inktomi. My step dad as too. When sold off their caching program assets he was shown the door.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[hendridm]

I guess my point wasn't so much whether or not Google does indeed track you or not, but that they (at least to me) portray a higher level of trust than Yahoo, giving Google a competitive edge. If more people "trust" that Google's results are not going to be altered significantly by payola, they will likely choose them over Yahoo (or so you'd think). Obviously, there are other factors that decide who will be king...

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget those times that Yahoo decided to reset everyone's preferences to "Yes, email advertisments and collect my personal information." They had a lot of balls to do that.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

When Yahoo dumped Ink for Google, I think we can all agree that the G results were much better. And at the time, Y didn't really see G as a competitor in the portal market. Both these have changed now. G lead in relevancy has all but disappeared (the /. crowd is slow to catch on though), and G is very much a competitor.

As for having the expertise, remember that Yahoo has also aquired the people that built AltaVista and AllTheWeb. They have some know-how...

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[hawaiian717]

Read Google's Toolbar Privacy Policy. The toolbar only sends the URL of the pages you visit to Google if you have the PageRank feature enabled, or you specifically request more information about the page that requires the URL (like Similar Pages).

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[Comsn]

the local yahoo that used to use ... google?

know of any good chinese/japanese search engines? goo.ne.jp seems to use google as well ;\

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[varag]

Complaining about popups? Why didn't you do the decent thing and install Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox or K-Meleon?

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

[bstil]

most kleenex you use isn't Kleenex-brand kleenex

You're incorrect. It's "Kleenex-brand FACIAL TISSUE". If you buy any other brand, you'll also see "Scott-brand facial tissue" or "Dove-brand facial tissue" or whatever. By calling it "kleenex-brand kleenex", you've just proved that "kleenex" is a brand-name that has become a generic term for "facial tissue." Your parent (reglar_joe) is correct.

On the other hand with Google, I think Google is more concerned about wide-spread brand recognition than the loss of trademark rights, at least at this point.

..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp"..

[burgburgburg]

Well, that has to be the dirtiest sentence I've read on /. this morning.

But the morning is young.

Re:..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp"..

[LostCluster]

I take it you haven't been reading at -1...

Re:..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp"..

[queen of everything]

slurp used to be one of the few crawlers that I saw in my access logs regularly. Lately, I haven't seen it around at all. In months actually. Now I see googlebot every day checking all my links and for updated pages. Just how accurate is Yahoo!'s search if slurp isn't really making the rounds like it used to?

Result relevance

[Tet]

Google prides itself on having not just the largest number of indexed pages, but more importantly, the relevance of the returned results. In general, I've found them to be ahead of the pack for this, which is one of the reasons I switched to them in the first place (the other being the uncluttered interface). I was quite surprised, then, when a couple of test searches with the new Yahoo engine returned more relevant searches than Google. I'm not going to switch just yet, but it's certainly something I'll be keeping an eye on...

Re:Result relevance

[Anonymous Coward]

"I was quite surprised, then, when a couple of test searches with the new Yahoo engine returned more relevant searches than Google." try it again in a month, you can bet your ass it will be different by then :(

Re:Result relevance

[costas]

Well, the good news is that Yahoo is trying to innovate, which in turn should push Google even further. For example, Yahoo is now linking directly to RSS feeds if you are using RSS-autodiscovery within your page's HTML. That's pretty cool.

Re:Result relevance

[puppet10]

Also I think its a good thing if there are a number of search engines with results on the same order of relevance as google returns but using different algos to get there.

The more there are the harder it is for the people trying to distort the results to succeed in distorting all of the various methods.

Re:Result relevance

[Anonymous Coward]

The #1 result for "fucktards" is PETA on Yahoo...

Re:Result relevance

[Rashkae]

> The #1 result for "fucktards" is PETA on Yahoo...

That's a very interesting observation. So basically, for #1 result, instead of displaying a page that actually contains the search term, Yahoo found a page that was linked too with the search word. That's just weird.

Re:Result relevance

[wintermute740]

I've actually been complaining of relevance of Google's results for awhile now. I always seem to have to wade through three pages of sites trying to sell me %search_item% rather than information about %search_item% but it wasn't always this way. I hope Yahoo doesn't pull a Google and do the same thing. If not, I, for one, welcome our new Yahoo overloards.

Re:Result relevance

[Naffer]

I think that from personal experiance, the best thing that Yahoo could do is find a way to lower the pagerank of:
1)those obnoxious portal site
2)Those sites that are just other crappier search engines
3)Those crappy storefronts that all lead to the same store.

Re:Result relevance

[mcguyver]

I was quite surprised, then, when a couple of test searches with the new Yahoo engine returned more relevant searches than Google.

It's interesting that you found Y!'s search results useful. The inktomi algorithm seemed to heavily favor keywords in URLs, meaning it would be easy to take advantage of Y!'s search engine.

One reason why Y!'s results may have seemed legit is because it's new territory. No one knows how to optimize for Y! - yet.

Re:Result relevance

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does that too... Hence the Litigious Bastards campaign was able to get the term associated with SCO's homepage, until SCO specifically asked Google to clean up for them.

Re:Result relevance

[Elbow Macaroni]

I tried to distort the results in Google but it just made my monitor look funny so I reset it back to the way it was before. So I don't think I would bother doing that with any other search engines.

Somewhere, on the deck of the USS Yahoo!

[Noryungi]

Gentlemen! Start your slurping!

You goal is to slurp more than 6,000,000,000 elements of the World Wide Web! It's a fight we cannot afford to lose! Now, go, and may Bob be with you!

Re:Somewhere, on the deck of the USS Yahoo!

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

For great justice, launch every slurp! (?)

Re:Somewhere, on the deck of the USS Yahoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Take off every slurp" is the correct usage. ;)

It is time...

[s.a.m]

Begun the search engine has

Innovation?

[arhca]

For all of Yahoo's work, it seems to be just a second-rate Google, trying to follow to leader. When will there be anything new from Yahoo!? (@#$%)

Yahoo has been planning this for ages

[naoiseo]

It's been live for about 6 months in some parts of the world.

I still have google results, but can see the new ink results by appending &tmpl=E088 on the end of the SERP url.

I can picture the board meeting

[ProudClod]

CEO: We want a search engine that evokes pride and confidence. Disgruntled Employee: *aside*Let's face it, compared to google it's gonna suck. */aside* How about "Slurp"? CEO: Slurp! I like it!

Re:I can picture the board meeting

[naoiseo]

slurp has been inktomi's name for years preceeding google.

all the google love in this place.. sheesh, the algo has fallen apart over the past year, teoma.com, alltheweb.com and now, likely, yahoo.com, will all provide better search results.

spammers love google for pr hyping their massive index, cus it keeps their huge cloaked spam sites in there just a little longer.

Re:I can picture the board meeting

[ProudClod]

Yeah, teoma are really fair with their $30 charge to submit a URL :)

Alltheweb I liked a while back (when altavista was king), but I can't actually tell any difference between it and google these days. You don't get anywhere by staying the same, they need to innovate (man)

Re:I can picture the board meeting

[naoiseo]

Teoma.. alltheweb? phhh, no google is the one who needs to innovate, and they'll likely steal the ideas from teoma and allthewb to do it. Of course, Yahoo owns alltheweb, and altavista, and inktomi now.

google has neither a refine your search option, nor a resources section like Teoma, or the clusters option that alltheweb offers.

The fact of the matter is, Google is full of spam, while Teoma isn't. Teoma simply produces more relevant results. Google is old and busted.

30 bucks to submit a url? ummm ya, if you don't want a crawler to find you. I have hundreds of sites indexed in Teoma, never paid a cent. It cost that much to get into Inktomi too, if you do PFI. It will cost that much to do a PFI for the new Yahoo program also. Google is the only one without PFI, for now.

I have to ask, what innovation do you think google has actually provided? A pop-up blocking toolbar that siphons information? perdy cool.

Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[justanyone]

What hardware are they running it on?

Did they replace the hardware or just the software?

Does anyone know?

Also, what is the basis of a search engine? Sparse-matrix navigation? How does this stuff really work? Any links to summaries of this stuff? It happened after I graduated (1992, BSCS)...

-- Kevin

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[plover]

I don't know, but I think they've been Slashdotted...

:-)

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[FooAtWFU]

Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
Interesting ports on m1.search.vip.dcn.yahoo.com (216.109.117.133):
(The 1656 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
Device type: general purpose
Running: Apple Mac OS X 10.1.X
OS details: Apple Mac OS X 10.1.5

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[AndroidCat]

I doubt it could be Linux. SCO hasn't made noises about suing them yet.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo uses it's own flavor of freeBSD (ybsd) for almost everything, though there may be other types of boxen in use for search.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[understyled]

Also, what is the basis of a search engine? Sparse-matrix navigation? How does this stuff really work? Any links to summaries of this stuff?

check out this series of essays related to search technology, as mentioned in a previous slashdot article.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[ravydavygravy]

Also, what is the basis of a search engine?

Well, the paper from 98 that describes the PageRank algorithm (as used by Google) can be found here

Theres a simple explanation of various indexing/ranking schemes here, but if you really want to get up to speed on research into searching the web, try looking at some of the papers from the TREC Web Track

Happy reading,

Dave

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[ViolentGreen]

Well I know for that google uses thousands of linuxs machines for cost and reliability reasons. I would suspect that yahoo does the same but I can't say for sure.

I wouldn't think that they would have to replace the hardware but you never know. With the power of todays even bargain machines, I suspect that the bottleneck would be the bandwidth. I could be mistaken though.

I sat in on a short talk by a guy from google. From what I remember, google has several starting pages for their crawlers. They just travel though all the links of the pages and every subsequent link, recording how many links go to a particular site to use in configuring the sites page rank. This continues until they have a full cached copy of most of the web.

I haven't checked this site but I found it by googling "how google works". http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[caluml]

To answer one of your questions:

Does anyone know?
I would imagine someone does, yes.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[Anonymous Coward]

What crack-head moron moderated the parent "Interesting"? The fucking moron nmap'ed a god damned VIP (load balancer), of _COURSE_ it 'aint going to return accurate fucking information.

I guarantee you they aren't running their data centres off a fucking Mac OS X piece of crap. Try, umm, Foundry perhaps?

Fucking clueless morons.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks like a bug in NMAP: there's no way of distinguishing between OS X and Darwin at that level.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[Mod Me God]

I think Yahoo uses a variety of FreeBSD for its server farms.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[mobby_6kl]

Netcraft confirms, BSD is being used.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[netik]

Yahoo is still using old Inktomi hardware, a collection of Suns, and (more recently) rackable linux servers.

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[npsimons]

Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
Interesting ports on m1.search.vip.dcn.yahoo.com (216.109.117.133):
(The 1656 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
Device type: general purpose
Running: Apple Mac OS X 10.1.X
OS details: Apple Mac OS X 10.1.5

Hmm, do I detect the acrid scent of mac zealotry? Which version of nmap are you using? Or maybe you just fudged the results. Hey, look, I can do that too!

Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
Interesting ports on w1.rc.vip.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.71.198):
(The 1553 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
Port State Service Owner
80/tcp open http
Device type: general purpose
Running: Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r5
OS details: Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r5
Dick length of admin: 16 meters

Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

[FooAtWFU]

Hmm, do I detect the acrid scent of mac zealotry? Which version of nmap are you using? Or maybe you just fudged the results. Hey, look, I can do that too!

Since you ask... I'm sorry that I cut this off to begin with, but when I ran nmap -P0 -O search.yahoo.com:

Starting nmap 3.48 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-02-18 10:06 EST

(The -P0 is necessary because the local university firewall blocks all incoming and outgoing pings.)
I don't own a Mac, and I don't know anyone who owns a Mac... and I haven't used a Mac since some Apple IIe machines in elementary and middle school. I run an IBM ThinkPad R40 slightly modified from the specs listed at that link: an 80 gigabyte hard drive with Fedora Core 1 currently installed.

Would anyone else with nmap care to confirm or deny my quick exploratory findings, for the benefit of npsimons (32752) and others who are all to quick to invent conspiracy theories implicating Mac-lovers?

Didn't....

[Zebra_X]

This happen before. I had thought that Yahoo! had been using google up until about a year ago. They dumped them, and started using their own search. I stopped using the Yahoo search becuase the results were not as good as google's, or so it seemed. Am I completely off here? I couldn't find anything about it on the web.

Re:Didn't....

[NickFitz]

I couldn't find anything about it on the web

Did you try googling for it?

Re:Didn't....

[Zebra_X]

Yes, I did. I'm talking about last year though. I was under the impressesion that they had dumped Google a while back and broght them back on. Yahoo's search results used to feature a Powered by google logo, but that went away.

Re:Didn't....

[matrix0f8h]

Or perhaps slurping for it?

Re:Didn't....

[NickFitz]

Sorry for being facetious :-)

I too had vaguely thought that Yahoo! had already switched. From reading this article, I think I probably just assumed, when they bought Inktomi, that they would have made the switch straight away.

Another interesting point is that so far, they have only rolled this out in the US. Looks like we Europeans will have to wait to be Slurped ;-)

Re:Didn't....

[drunknjew]

i see college kids in 10 years asking members of the opposite sex if they want to "go back to their place to google", but slurping just sounds WAY too messy.

I love Google.

[Chess_the_cat]

I love Google (the new deskbar rocks) and I also frequent Yahoo! for chess and Fantasy Hockey. What I want to know is this: why is being the number search engine worth fighting over? Other than selling services to corporations and little text ads, how does Google make money? Or more importantly, why does Google need to be the number one search engine to make money? This reminds me of the browser wars. The logic was, you owned the browser, you owned the 'net. And although you could make the case that IE won the war, how does IE being the most popular browser translate into money for MS when they give it away for free? I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now.

Re:I love Google.

[L-s-L69]

Google to a lot of people is the ONLY search engine. Its become a brand much more so than IE, or even (arguably) Windows. The phrases 'to google' and 'googling' are fast becoming part of the english language on both sides of the pond. In order to google to keep getting the fat ad subs they live off it still needs to be number one. With IE it was just to eliminate the competition.

Re:I love Google.

[DrSkwid]

paid submissions (those on the right on a google page) are a revenue stream

also https://www.google.com/adsense/default

which places those same paid ads on *your* website

I make $30 a day from those puppies

Re:I love Google.

[sugar and acid]

>Other than selling services to corporations and little text >ads, how does Google make money?

Ummm by selling services to corporations and little text ads. Googles advertising model is a very good way to make money on the internet by servicing both types of customers well, the normal google user and the advertisers.

Why, well the text ads are unobtrusive and obvious as advertisement links, and often welcome by the searcher. Why are they welcome, because they relate directly to the search term used. So you search for widgets, and widget inc. pays to put themselves on the first search page. The company gets trade, and the customer gets what they are looking for. In the real world this is the equivalent to the yellowpages directory where companies pay money to be listed with a small advert under a relevant indexed title like plumber or something.

So why does google have to be number one, because the more eyeballs they have the more money they can charge for an ad and the more companies that will be clamouring to get their little ad link under the "widgets" search term. Again for the yellowpages, in the US ever seen those ads from one or the other yellowpages directory saying that they are the preferred yellowpages by consumers, they are advertsising to potential advertisers in their directory implying that you will get the most value if you advertise in our directory and not the competitions. Same reasons google needs to be number one to maximise their profit.

Re:I love Google.

[AndroidCat]

With IE it was just to eliminate the competition.

Until MS started giving away IE, they weren't really competing with Netscape. Perhaps they just wanted to kill a meta-competitor? (Trying to be the only frog in the Windows pond has always been their problem.)

Re:I love Google.

[Glog]

It's not a question about who gets to index more webpages. It's a question of control of the flow of information. If you control the flow you can pretty much demand any price for your services.

Re:I love Google.

[ykardia]

The logic was, you owned the browser, you owned the 'net. And although you could make the case that IE won the war, how does IE being the most popular browser translate into money for MS when they give it away for free? I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now.

Being the most popular browser on the net means that you can add your own extensions to it, and a lot of people designing websites will cater towards that. If you don't release IE for other platforms, people who don't use your OS won't be able to use the websites that have IE specific content. That's a way of giving people incentives to use IE and your OS.

I have been pissed of lots of times, trying to use IE-specific websites (banks seem to like to do this especially) with a different browser, and it didn't work.

Re:I love Google.

[Threni]

> I have been pissed of lots of times, trying to use IE-specific websites (banks
> seem to like to do this especially) with a different browser, and it didn't
> work.

I hope you emailed the sitemaster telling them as such. Even when I have to use an IE browser I often have it configured so it looks like its a Mozilla based one.

Re:I love Google.

[scrytch]

how does Google make money?

They do a brisk business in appliance boxen. And ads. Those ads aren't just on google.com, they're syndicated to many outside sites. It's not actually a massive amount of cash, but they

And although you could make the case that IE won the war, how does IE being the most popular browser translate into money for MS when they give it away for free?

It never made money -- it sold windows. MS was deathly afraid that netscape's plans to make the desktop obsolete by making a middleware platform out of NSPR would actually succeed. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that godawful mess gaining any traction (XUL and XPCOM might have half a chance if they had any decent documentation and tools) but there you have it. Microsoft moves fast when it's afraid of something.

Re:I love Google.

[scrytch]

hm, shub-internet ate my post... should have been:

"It's not actually a massive amount of cash, but they get enough to leverage purchases of other IP or whole companies that are more profitable once they IPO. The investors are betting that google will manage their assets intelligently, whatever they are. Yahoo for example, never made a profit as a portal, but now seems to be able to keep a lot of balls in the air with its multitude of services and be profitable as a result. I expect that the market will want Google to remain more focused. Who knows, maybe there won't ever be a profit in that sector. It's enough that other people are willing to believe that there may, and it's still a bit more reasoned than the "give it all away for free and sell banner ads" mania of the dotcom craze".

Re:I love Google.

[innerlimit]

1.

salesgeek (selling a lindows/linux pc) : It comes fully equipped with everything you need to surf and enjoy the web.

customer : Does it there have that exploder thingy?

salesgeek : no, our compuers have a way better browser/os installed

customer : nah sorry, my friend told me to go for the exploder thingy, he was sure of it

2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:I love Google.

[OgreChow]

One thing MS gains when everyone uses IE is the knowledge that their non-standard initiatives, such as ActiveX and .NET, will be supported by a large user base.

Re:I love Google.

[no soup for you]

Other than selling services to corporations and little text ads, how does Google make money?

They also sell a nice intranet searching device, and I forsee customized searches for niche applications. Don't cound them out because they give several services away for free. They've been profitable for a while.

Re:I love Google.

[rsgopi]

Internet is a pull medium not a push like the broadcast television. The old dotcoms never understood the internet and so pushed unrelevent banner ads/popups which the customer never wanted in the first place. Search is the perfect way to monetize the pull nature of the internet. I estimate within 2 years search and its sisters contextual advertising and local search/yellow page listings will make more than 85% of the total online ad spending . FYI last year google made more than a billion in those little boxes !. Its other revenue source like the search technology licensing and search appliance made just peanuts (10-20 million)

Re:I love Google.

[SacredNaCl]

I have been pissed of lots of times, trying to use IE-specific websites (banks seem to like to do this especially) with a different browser, and it didn't work.

I've been pissed even more when I buy a piece of hardware that says "You can access it with any HTML compliant web browser". Only to find out that to truly access all of the functions in it that you need to use IE. I've come across a few software packages that make that same claim as well but wont fully work without IE. It's annoying.

But...

[JoeBaldwin]

Everyone will just use Google.

Flawed idea

[Bish.dk]

From the CNET article:
One of the key ways Yahoo plans to make money from its search platform is to charge companies for more rapid and frequent inclusion into its index--a program called paid inclusion.

Read: "Google is still king". I want an objective search engine, not one where companies can pay for placement. It seems very stupid of Yahoo! to introduce a product that is flawed this way, if they really want to take on Google. Google has the advantage of currently being considered the best search engine by almost everyone, so Yahoo! needs a superior product if they are serious about getting more popular.

Re:Flawed idea

[Deacon Jones]

I want an objective search engine, not one where companies can pay for placement

I agree with you, but that doesn't happen with google? It seems with all the google ads everywhere, that something, somewhere is being affected.

as well, more and more my google searches disappoint me in that my first 20 results (give or take) are almost always commercial sites. Yes, I know there's ways to "hack around" that, but that's not the point.

as well, i swear i've read stories about certain sites vying in random ways to have their site come up higher than the compeition's in google searches.

its unfortunately, all commercial.

Re:Flawed idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're misunderstanding...
This is not mayment for a higher rank in the results, it is payment to be indexed more often. No search engine indexes the whole web every day, it takes weeks to do a reasonabley complete crawl. The payment just ensures that if you pay, there will be very little lag between when you put up new content and when people have a chance of finding it in a search. The search algorithm itself should remain objective.

Re:Flawed idea

[ViolentGreen]

I want an objective search engine, not one where companies can pay for placement I agree with you, but that doesn't happen with google? It seems with all the google ads everywhere, that something, somewhere is being affected.

as well, more and more my google searches disappoint me in that my first 20 results (give or take) are almost always commercial sites. Yes, I know there's ways to "hack around" that, but that's not the point.

as well, i swear i've read stories about certain sites vying in random ways to have their site come up higher than the compeition's in google searches.

Google does do this but their paid links are clearly marked and not insidiously mixed with the search results. Try searching for a7n8x. There are 4 one line links at the top of the page from their product search (not sure if this is paid or not) then links on the right of the page that are paid. These are in different colors and not mixed with the regular search results. It would hard to confuse the paid/non-paid results. Companies sidestep this by putting up a bunch of dummy pages that only link

Re:Flawed idea

[miu]

as well, i swear i've read stories about certain sites vying in random ways to have their site come up higher than the compeition's in google searches.

There are the slimy "web placement enhancement" services that will work to increase the relevance of your site on the most popular search engines. I think Search King (or something like that) was the one that made the most noise about google resisting their attempts to manipulate pagerank for comercial sites.

Amateurs doing the same for fun and to score points on an ideological opponent have gamed the google results, one of the best known instances being 'santorum'.

Not all comercial, just mostly.

Re:Flawed idea

[Dun Malg]

I want an objective search engine, not one where companies can pay for placement

I agree with you, but that doesn't happen with google?

Not overtly, at least. Google doesn't let people pay for higher placement in their regular search. Paying Google advert money just gets you better placement next to the search results. Google searches do come up with a lot of junk, but you know at least they're trying to minimize it. To create a bizarre, tortured analogy:

Google: "We promise not to crap on your lawn. Others might be following us, and they might crap on your lawn, but we'll try to get rid of them if we can. Any crap we're paid to show you, we'll display it on the sidewalk for you and you can decide whether you want it or not."

Yahoo: "We're gonna crap on your lawn. Good luck trying not to step in it."

Re:Flawed idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I license your ASCII Cthulhu? ;-)

Re:Flawed idea

[cens0r]

living in seattle and reading savage love weekly, it made me smile the first time I heard someone else use the term santorum. It was also qutie funny the first time I put it into google.

Re:Flawed idea

[Fred IV]

as well, more and more my google searches disappoint me in that my first 20 results (give or take) are almost always commercial sites. Yes, I know there's ways to "hack around" that, but that's not the point.

as well, i swear i've read stories about certain sites vying in random ways to have their site come up higher than the compeition's in google searches.

That's just part of living in a dynamic world. It's a dance between Google and webmasters looking for traffic...google improves, webmasters adapt, repeat. I would rather be able to limit results using queries that include -store, -buy, -shop, or whatever than search using a site that censors results by removing pages that may be trying to rank well.

What's worse...the motivation of individuals to make money or the will of a large company to censor?

FIV

Re:Flawed idea

[Dun Malg]

Can I license your ASCII Cthulhu? ;-)

I think it's from a long-ago USENET post where the poster promised anyone using his sig will get eaten first, so I figure it's OK to use for those "in the know". :)

Re:Flawed idea

[abomb77]

Not a flawed idea.

Think about why restaurants offer valet parking.

Some people are willing to pay for valet parking while others will drive around for 30+ mins looking for something for free. Point being, it depends on how much time you've got and how much its worth to you.

If you run a commercial website that changes often (new/removed/updated content), you may want this convienence.

If you're out of stock on an item why not remove the result from the search engine until you do have more in stock.

Re:Flawed idea

[16K Ram Pack]

This probably works for a fair number of dumb consumers who will just click the top links on a subject.

BUT, it doesn't serve consumers well, and won't help people find information, and consequently, many consumers will go away.

The sooner Google deal with the link farmers who just create a ton of noise the better. Businesses who want to get noticed should spend money on targetted ads, or get listed in www.yell.co.uk or something.

Re:Flawed idea

[badrad]

Your mis-understanding paid inclusion. It is different from paid placement.

With regular, "organic" listings you have no control over how long it takes the engine to find your site if a its a new site and how often the engine revisits it.

With paid INCLUSION, you achieve two things. The first is you can get your site into the index within a few days, whereas sometimes it can take months to naturally get in. Second, the engine visits you much more often, near daily, so your content stays fresh.

Your payment does nothing to influence the placement of your site in the SERPS, it just lets you be INCLUDED into the engine more quickly and more often. Thus, paid inclusion not paid placement.

Pain inclusion is a good thing. I wish Google had it. My work has many clients that would jump at it, and Im glad to see Yahoo have it (if its affordable - havent checked).

Re:Flawed idea

[edrugtrader]

if i'm PAYING to put my ad for a certain search term, don't you think that my link is probably VERY relavant?

Re:Flawed idea

[mcubed]

Pain inclusion is a good thing.

Sado-masochists worldwide rejoice at Yahoo!'s new search engine capabilities ... details at 11 (after the kiddies have gone to bed ... we're a little worried about the FCC).

--Michael

How does this improve Yahoo!?

[yog]

Most people use Google as their default search tool, even a lot of those unsophisticated Windows users whose IE still comes up with the default MSN page. It's entered the vernacular as a common verb.

How does Yahoo! improve its service by switching away from Google? Unless they have developed an equivalent if not better search engine, which up until now no one has done, all they are doing is downgrading the quality of their service.

Thumbs down, Yahoo. Use the best tool for the job.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[bad-badtz-maru]

Yahoo's objective isn't to improve their service, their objective is to improve company revenues. Since Yahoo has owned Inktomi for over a year, it's ridiculous for them to continue to license results from Google.

As for what is the "best tool for the job", you might want to actually take a look at the new Yahoo results instead of blindly pimping Google. It looks entirely possible that the current Yahoo/Inktomi algorithm returns results that are more relevant than Google's current algorithm.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[Unwise One]

How does Yahoo! improve its service by switching away from Google?

I don't believe that improving their service is a necessity here. Simply providing something roughly equivalent is probably OK. Most users never knew that Yahoo search and Google were the same thing, despite the "powered by Google" logo next to it. A very talented network guy commented to me the other day that he preferred using Yahoo search to Google since he got similar results without Google's advertizing. He was stunned when I pointed out the obvious reason for this.

But the real reason for the switch has nothing to do with providing an improved service: they are either making more of a profit with their own engine than by licensing Google, or believe that they will in the near future.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[XaXXon]

Thumbs down, Yahoo. Use the best tool for the job.

Unfortunately, the job in this case is "Make money." Google has all these ethics things that get in the way of that. Things like not resorting their main search results order to include paid results, always putting advertisements in color. Advertisers don't like that.

It's kind of weird.. The way I look at it is this: Guys always want the virginal girl.. but they don't want her to stay a virgin around them. Advertisers want a search engine just like that. They want a search engine that everyone respects, except they want to underhandedly move their results up to the top.. which loses respect. Google does everything it can to keep the respect. Sure, for a few dollars, it might let you feel it up, but if you go around claiming that you shagged it, it goes and changes its entire rating system and drops your pages to the bottom of its list.

Google frickin' rules.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[bad-badtz-maru]

Yeah, google is real pure and kicks total ass. Ever notice how many spammy search results redirect to ebay and amazon? Why can't they fix that? Oh wait, notice how many of the adwords displayed on the side are for ebay or amazon?

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[caluml]

Sure, for a few dollars, it might let you feel it up
Google is like a virgin?
Man, you're weird.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[Dun Malg]

Yeah, google is real pure and kicks total ass. Ever notice how many spammy search results redirect to ebay and amazon? Why can't they fix that? Oh wait, notice how many of the adwords displayed on the side are for ebay or amazon?

Not really Google's fault there. That just shows how ebay and amazon are agressive marketers. In addition to paying for google ads, amazon has a bizarre affiliate-type program that basically replicates their pages on other people's sites, essentially spamming ALL search engines. How many times have you popped up results for a word combo or phrase that happened to appear in someone's amazon review and gotten the same damn thing, on different sites, over and over? This, for example, is what I got when I was looking for hacks to the REB1200 ebook reader. I'm sure google would kill that crap if there was an easy way. For the time being I suggest just picking an unusual word from the offending amazon review and exclude it, like this.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[robotoverflow]

Sure, for a few dollars, it might let you feel it up, but if you go around claiming that you shagged it, it goes and changes its entire rating system and drops your pages to the bottom of its list.

You might want to work on using analogies that us slashdot readers can relate to.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[joeykiller]

Why give Yahoo! thumbs down for using their own technology? If you're an average Slashdot user, shouldn't you be an advocate of choice?

To simplify: We have Gnome and we have KDE, we have Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, we have Perl and Python. Would you like a world where everbody used Windows, or everybody said that Perl was mandatory? Or to live in a one party state?

Maybe Yahoo! and MSN's new search engines won't be of Google quality in the beginning, but I guess they'll catch up. We should cheer them on. Google's starting to get a position where they actually can (if they want, I'm not saying they are) control the flow of information. So my position on this is that the more search engines, and the more equal they are both in capabilities and market share, the better.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[Mr. Piddle]

How does Yahoo! improve its service by switching away from Google?

It increases competition in a market where competition has been waning. Competition is the life-blood of the free world. Would you really want Google to become the one and only search engine to then be left for stagnation and/or abuse by government or corporate interests?

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[yog]

Your point is well taken regarding competition. However, if someone is the technology leader, and you want to bypass them to gain more upstream revenue, you had better have something better up your sleeve. Thus far Yahoo's search does not seem even as good as Google's, so there's no compelling reason for everyone to switch from "googling" to "yahooing" now.

Consider this analogy. Redhat, one of the market leaders in Linux distributions (or at least they were until they dropped the retail version), decides to drop market leader KDE in favor of their own, homebrew windowing desktop environment. (Just assume for the moment that KDE's the technology leader, though of course that's debatable.) RH comes out with a mediocre, "me-too" window environment that's not quite as good as KDE but promises at some unspecified time in the future to equal if not surpass it. Is this a wise business decision? Is this a good use of their core strengths and resources? Of course, YHOO already purchased Inktomi so perhaps they need to leverage its technology to justify the purchase, though it does make me wonder what their long term plan is.

As a Yahoo stockholder, I do hope they do well; despite what that guy said about "pimping for google", I'm simply interested in creating some dialogue. However, the market so far does not seem too impressed (although to be fair, YHOO is up 300% from a year ago, so the market has probably already factored in this new feature).

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[16K Ram Pack]

Whether in print or online, I want to know that somethings an ad or not. Uprating results or using product placements/'advertisement features' annoys me, and tends to lower my respect for the publication.

I don't mind ads. Sometimes, ads have helped me find out about services I didn't know about. Google's are often good because you can find small providers of services.

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[joeykiller]

I see what you mean with the RedHat/KDE comparison. Maybe the Yahoo Search is a bit worse without Google, and maybe Yahoo loses some customers because of this. So far your analogy works. But isn't Yahoo's situation a little bit different?

What I think is different is the fact that Yahoo was doing was paying big money to what became its worst competitor. RedHat, as far as I know, haven't paid anything to the KDE folks, so if RedHat switched to an inferior product it would make no sense because only RedHat would lose. They would have to finance the new desktop, and perhaps lose sales at the same time.

But for Yahoo to continue paying Google and see them continue to grow, while Yahoo itself loses market share, is meaningless from a business perspective. There's just no way to win anything in that situation.

Now Yahoo can finance their own search technology, try to become better and regain market share on Google's expense. This makes sense from a business perspective, and perhaps they as a side effect prevents Google from becoming an Information Monopolist (that's the situation I fear).

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[Prof.Phreak]

...or everybody said that Perl was mandatory?

Yes, I would love to live in such a world :-)

Re:How does this improve Yahoo!?

[The Cydonian]

One simple way:- cluster all amazon pages into a single thread, instead of spreading them all over your results page. Like some of the newer generation search tools do.

Some initial results

[Anonymous Coward]

"goat sex jello"
Yahoo: 9070 Google: 7780

"endothelial maximum peanut butter rate"
Yahoo: 142 Google: 116

"bsd is dying"
Yahoo: 63300 Google: 18900

Seems like Google's got some competition!

Re:Some initial results

[hatrisc]

how relevant are the results though? doesn't google pride itself on trying to provide the most relevant search results?

Re:Some initial results

[jeff munkyfaces]

the most important thing is which links are displayed on the first page of results, and how relevant they are.

i think i'll leave you to analyse these..

Re:Some initial results

[Randatola]

"litigious bastards" #1 results:
Yahoo: The SCO Group's official website
Google: Some chintzy site about Google bombing SCO

In fact, site:sco.com does not appear anywhere in Google's 13,700 results for "litigious bastards", which was the whole point of the silly Google bombing.

I'm going to try out Yahoo's new search technology, because I'm tired of every google search I do resulting in the top 50 results all trying to sell me something (usually not even what I searched for). If I was looking to buy something, I'd use Froogle. And increasingly often the top sites are all identical keyword-stuffed pages at different domains-- obviously googlebombed results.

I was using the web when Lycos came out. It blew me away. Then altavista came out, and it blew Lycos away. Then there was an uncertain period, and then Google came out and blew everything else away. Let's set aside our love of Google for a minute, and imagine a search engine that blows Google away. There's no reason why it can't happen. I'm not saying Yahoo! is it; in fact I doubt it. But there's a lot of groupthink here that anything new that's not Google can't be as good or better than Google. There's clearly a lot of room for improvement.

I'm rambling. I'll stop now.

Re:Some initial results

[TheSunborn]

That's because site:sco.com tell google ONLY to search at pages located at sco.com and I don't think they themself have the term litigious bastards at their homepage.

Re:Some initial results

[Anonymous Coward]

"litigious bastards" doesn't show the sco.com website in Google because the site has been down for a while. It used to work, and it'll likely work when the site comes back up again.

In my opinion this is a plus for Google, it doesn't list dead sites.

Ugly

[glpierce]

Now that is one ugly search engine. It's amazing they made it look that bad, especially when you consider that they just ripped off the Google color scheme and format.

Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun!

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Or not.

I mean this is just another stop along the way which has brought us the original Yahoo! directory, Altavista, Inktomi, Hotbot, Metacrawler, MSN Search, ..., Google, etc.

It's hardly worth thinking about. So Yahoo! dropped Google: good for them. The best thing we can have is competition between different vendors, then we'll get some innovation. After all, Google innovated like hell to be better than the other engines, now let's see what Yahoo! (or others) can do to be better than Google.

This doesn't have to be portrayed as some kind of war: that assumes that you take sides, and I'm not willing to be on Google's side. If something better comes along I'll switch.

John.

Re:Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun!

[aricusmaximus]

The best thing we can have is competition between different vendors, then we'll get some innovation.

Not yet, apparently.
The Yahoo search interface is a blatant ripoff of Google, from the names of the tabs down to the "SafeSearch" image search setting.

This bodes ill for Google - it's basically a one-trick pony (searching), while Yahoo has branched out into several services. And now Yahoo has set up a Google clone. Soon anyone else who licenses Inktomi's technology will be able to set up Google clones. Google's technology just took one giant leap to being commodotized.

Looks like the window on a huge Google IPO has closed folks.

Yahoo!

[hatrisc]

but, when you say yahoo does it mean "to perform a websearch" like Google.

Marketing dept.

[lukewarmfusion]

Imagine the cash shelled out to develop their new name - and they come up with Slurp. Some marketing jackass is sitting in his yacht, drinking - no, *slurping* - a pina colada, and thinking to himself, "I can't believe they paid my for that."

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

[LookSharp]

"I'm sorry, the correct answer is 'who gives a shit?'" :)

Seriously, I'm sure we're all deeply concerned about which search engine Yahoo is using today. I forget, do we WANT Google to become the master search engine, or not? Or is that another thing we change day by day?

What are the perceived implications? That will answer my follow-on question, "Why is this newsworthy?"

Re:Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

If you're going to mention Triumph, you have to mention things that are great for him to poop on, as well.

Re:Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

[meta-monkey]

It's newsworthy to me. I run a small business that depends in large part on attracting visitors to my website. When you do a Google search for my keywords, you get all kinds of crap. Inktomi, and now Yahoo, give much better results.

Let's say you're in Mytown, and you're looking for a widget supplier. So you search in Google for "Mytown widget supplier." You'd think that, perhaps, that would return a list of widget suppliers in Mytown. Directories of Mytown Widget Suppliers, or reviews of said suppliers, would also be appropriate. Not on Google. Instead, you get widget suppliers on the other side of the country. You get posts on somebody's blog about how their brother-in-law, who visited Mytown once, is really into widgets and loves Air Supply.

I've got about 10 competitors in town with decent (i.e., searchable) websites. Only about four of them even show up on Google. And they bounce around like crazy. For awhile I was number 1. Then I was on page 7. Then I dropped off completely. Then I was back at #2. Same thing with my competitors...with no rhyme or reason. I'm not saying that Google in any way "owes" us placement in their search engine, but I am saying that their results are not always relevant. There's no way that twenty pages of blog entries or random websites that have absolutely nothing to do with Mytown Widget Supply are more relevant than the list of the top ten or so Mytown Widget Suppliers, when the search terms are "Mytown Widget Supplier."

On Yahoo, now, we're all there. I just did a search, and found my site and every one of my competitor's sites within the first two pages. That's a much better search result for somebody who searches for "Mytown Widget Supplier."

Re:Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

[bad-badtz-maru]

Since Google has lately been changing their algorithm more than a chick changes panties, there is a definite possibility of them becoming unseated as the search king. The new Yahoo results look really nice, particularly compared to post-November Google results.

Re:Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

[LookSharp]

Thank you for an informative reply. I see that people have exploited the commercial potential in Google, and that it needs to be more consistent.

Unfortunately, the grandparent is getting savaged in moderation, so your Insightful parent may go unnoticed. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to explain why I should care. :)

search results design

[bstil]

Yahoo has gone so far as to imitate Google's search results design:

title: blue, size +1
excerpts: two lines
date: green, size: green, "cached" link: gray, etc.

Yahoo does not have a time stamp for pages, but everything else looks very similar!

Re:search results design

[ElGnomo]

yet somehow yahoo's interface looks like crap compared to google's.

Yahoo is Inktomi

[Soukyan]

Yahoo! has owned Inktomi since March of 2003 so the name change is cosmetic issue. As to dropping Google, it was only a matter of time. I'm thinking Yahoo!'s Paid Inclusion Services to their search engine technology is making a tidy profit. The problem? Their search technology still doesn't appear to be as reliable, accurate or quick as Google.

Re:Yahoo is Inktomi

[Jugalator]

Ooh, that explains why I thought Yahoo! had "used" Inktomi before. :-P

Yahoo's Own Search

[faust13]

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with Yahoo's new search. It returned relavent results, and a little to my surprise that were different that what Google offered.

In the long run competition is good, and I hope that we yield the benefits from having two good search engines. Although, I'm still apprehensive about Yahoo's "paid inclusion." Which seems to offer misleading results to the Internet novice.

Check out what I'm trading

Re:Yahoo's Own Search

[bad-badtz-maru]

You might want to find out what "paid inclusion" actually encompasses before commenting on its influence on the search results.

Re:Yahoo's Own Search

[hobbespatch]

But what of Yahoo's Directory? When I needed specific information for research pieces I use google - cause of the ranked results and better quality (and timely) information.

But, when I wanted to do some shopping, just browse, or find similar businesses in a category - I used Yahoo's directory. Will the new search replace the directory?

Is there a better directory/category index than Yahoo I should be using?

Yahoo's Google results were always a mess...

[blorg]

...hidden as they were among the enormous amount of other crap, it was difficult to tell which were the real results. As it was, I found Yahoo search to be so bad as to dilute Google's reputation if anything.

This new search so far seems better than the previous Yahoo search if anything, as they are putting the 'web' results up front, reasonably uncluttered, with everything else as seperate tabs. They could have done this with the Google ones before, but I presume they wanted to promote their own content.

Didn't Yahoo use Inktomi in the past?

[Jugalator]

Hmm... I just have a feeling they did and that it sucked. :-) But it seems Inktomi recently released Web Search 9 of their search engine (version 9?) and this change by Yahoo! seems to coincide with that one well enough that they might use some brand new engine, and not just rolling back to some old pre-Google quality crap.

Here's by the way the press release, which I think should have been linked to from the /. article at least:
Yahoo Press Release

Re:Didn't Yahoo use Inktomi in the past?

[bad-badtz-maru]

The results that Yahoo is serving is not "pure Inktomi". MSN licenses Inktomi search also and MSN's results never match pure Inktomi either, although Yahoo's results are much further from pure Inktomi than MSN's are. I suspect that Yahoo will maintain their own algorithm for Yahoo Inktomi and a separate algorithm for Inktomi licensees.

Re:Didn't Yahoo use Inktomi in the past?

[LostCluster]

There really isn't a reference point for what "pure Inktomi" is anymore, if there ever was. Inktomi.com has never been a search engine, just the marketing info for the company that sells its search service to others who do the marketing.

I get the feeling that every Inktomi using site is using a slightly diferent sort order formula at this point, so that they don't all look exactly the same. Such a scheme might also frustrate link spammers, as it might be possible to climb to the top of one Inktomi result screen by cheating, but it'd be nearly impossible to cheat your way to the top of all of them.

Re:Didn't Yahoo use Inktomi in the past?

[bad-badtz-maru]

I agree with you, but there is a site that has a reference search for pure inktomi results, which is useful for analyzing the tweaking that the licensees are doing. I don't want to post the url because it will be slashdotted.

yeah, who does googles searches.

[way2trivial]

I'm serious.. I was curious about their 'farm'

whatismyip.com is a nice page that tells you your ip. Google's cache for that page at
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U TF-8&q=whatismyip.com shows the machine that indexed it was at 64.68.82.168 which IP lookup traces ultimately back to http://www.cwusa.com/ a microsoft centric company with ip, hosting and data services.. what is google's database holding a record that originated from there-- any theories?

Thank you..

[bob670]

Microsoft, for once your black touch came near something as simple and useful as Internet searches, everyone smelled blood and money in the water. Yahoo and anyone with a little cash will now try to turn searching into huge profits and advertising tie ins, it will become more difficult to do legitimate research, then we can have another round of dot.com funding, create another tech bubble and screw the industry up some more. With both Linux and Mac OS X having proven themselves as outstanding alternatives to Windows I do wish more people would wake up to switching and start depleting Microsft's cash coffers a little, that way they coudn't move in and screw up other industries like smart phones, gaming and now search engines. And if you don't see the tie-in between Yahoo's actions and Microsft overtures toward search you are not paying attention.

Re:Thank you..

[bad-badtz-maru]

Uh, I am paying attention and I don't see the tie-in between Yahoo's actions and Microsoft's "overtures". The first company to successfully monetize search results was our old buddy Google, MS came in late in the game as always.

Re:Thank you..

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Don't forget your foil hat, man.. You seem to be able to draw a line from Microsoft to All Evil Everywhere. Next, you'll be posting about Billy Bob Gates and Kim Jong being in bed together.

Re:Thank you..

[bob670]

But MS has the cash to wait out anyone and then try to "MSN-ize" net searching, do you really want some marketing spin dork in Redmond deciding what is relevant for Net searches? Google makes money off of search but they make clear what is an advertisement and what is a result based on relevance, will Yahoo and MS do this? Doubtful. MS leaks an interest in owning Google or developing it's own search technology, Yahoo panics and starts pumping out a "new" search technology to replace Google as their search technology, and the marketing campaign to marginalize Google with Windows users has begun. MS might be late as always, but when have the much cash you show up whenever you damn well please.

Re:Thank you..

[bad-badtz-maru]

The only problem to this is that Yahoo bought Inktomi well before word of MSN search had leaked out...

But I do agree that MS will steamroll right over everyone. I assume they are going to release an enhanced search in Windows that ties local machine searching with their new web search, using bundling to kill Google just like they did with IE to kill Netscape.

Re:Thank you..

[bob670]

I would tend to agree, and if you have seen the "smart tagging" stuff they have been embedding into the last couple versions of Office it becomes clear it won't take much effort to ....

1. Get the average users hooked on what appears to be an amazing convenience. I type an email in Outlook or Messenger asking Suzy the red headed club foot in accounting if she would like to meet me for coffe after work. Office hits MSN search and pulls up the Coffee keyword, sees Starbuck's has paid it's bill this month and embeds a coupon and a map to this closest Starbucks in your email with one click. Only those who can afford to pay MSN search rates will be able to play.

2. Influence other companies to not use Google for search or advertising since MS can simply discount any rival to death.

What I find most amazing is that there will be people in this discussion who won't see anything but MS trying to "compete" and not get left behind again, but with 90% plus of the desktop and browser market that would simply be impossible. The only reason MS wants in so bad is to dominate search, not participate or remain competitive. MS still hasn't gotten it's core business right (Windows security anyone??) and now they want to bring their shoddy workmanship and lowered expectations to search?

Re:Thank you..

[yotaku]

1. Get the average users hooked on what appears to be an amazing convenience. I type an email in Outlook or Messenger asking Suzy the red headed club foot in accounting if she would like to meet me for coffe after work. Office hits MSN search and pulls up the Coffee keyword, sees Starbuck's has paid it's bill this month and embeds a coupon and a map to this closest Starbucks in your email with one click. Only those who can afford to pay MSN search rates will be able to play.

My questions to you: Is this really all that bad? So maybe you were planning to go to a starbucks anyway. Hey, maybe they just pointed out a closer starbucks that you hadn't thought of. And is a coupon for coffee a bad thing to get just before you go out for coffee?

Re:Thank you..

[Raistlin77]

Yes, it is bad. Think about it. Everyone is trying so hard to get rid of SPAM. If MS can stick a coupon in an email that you sent, what makes that any different than SPAM? The person who is getting my email certainly didn't sign up to receive offers from StarBucks, nor did I request that those offers be automatically injected into my personal outgoing email.

Re:Thank you..

[Anonymous Coward]

...And if you don't see the tie-in between Yahoo's actions and Microsoft overtures toward search you are not paying attention.

In other words, those who point out the tie-in haven't been paying enough to Yahoo and Microsoft for attention in the form of page ranking...

Slurp?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not call it Yahoo! Suck and cut out all the marketing nonsense

searches

[scarolan]

Lately the quality of Google's search has declined significantly, especially for less common phrases. Seems a lot of what comes up is spam/redirect pages that are just packed with keywords to get you to visit a porn site.

Re:searches

[I confirm I'm not a]

Interestingly, I've noticed that the quality of search results from booble has improved recently - coincidence?

;)

Re:searches

[freshman_a]

no kidding. a Google search for the words "litigious bastards" doesn't list SCO's website as the #1 link anymore (at least not as i'm writing this...), but a Yahoo! search for the same shows SCO's site right up there on top. shame on you Google...

Re:searches

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's a pitty Google has recently stopped archiving groups like rec.games.chess.computer.

Googling vs Yahoo!ing vs Slurping

[theguywhosaid]

assuming yahoo steals the show and becomes the more used search engine, what will happen to the verb google?

Results

[savagedome]

Searching for Yahoo on Yahoo comes up with about 102 million hits.

Searching for Yahoo on Google comes up with 119 million hits.

Google got depth :)
Yahoo can't even search its own kind!

Re:Results

[lcde]

whats really bad is searching
site:yahoo.com on google yeilds 14,100,000

while
searching site:yahoo.com on yahoo only yeilds 7,580,000


(Side note: yahoo's url is also longer, this will take more time to type in on IE :D)

nice page

[minus_273]

i like the new lean yahoo page: http://search.yahoo.com/ also the results are comparable to google. Searching for my name turned out a few things i had never seen on Yahoo. Quite nice. I think i have another search engine to use. Gotta love capitalism!

http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html

[GillBates0]

Slightly OT, but take a look at that page (No images, just text page for those at work)...it lists all the misspelt versions of britney spears detected by their spell checker.

Not sure why this page is even up there...it doesn't look like it's linked to from anywhere else.

And even the location is wrong...it's under their Jobs area. I think this page isn't supposed to be up on a public server...maybe somebody'll look at it here and correct a possible vulnerability.

Re:http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html

[romcabrera]

It IS listed from somewhere else. I'm to lazy to search for it, but there is somewhere in their site they explain about the spelling correction google does, and that page is an example of the many variations the name of Britney has among searchers...

Re:http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html

[Gorath99]

Just follow the link near the top of the page and you'll get here, which is recruiting page from which they link to the britney page.

Yahoo had a search engine??

[filtersweep]

Pardon my sarcasm, but their officially "approved" "directory listings" were never all that easy to break into if someone wanted their own site listed and I've always been very skeptical that sites paid for their placement as Yahoo supplanted their "free" services with more and more paid and subscription-based services. I'm not suggesting that they should not run as a "profitable" business, but what is advertising and what are legitimate search results? It is not unlike deciphering Fox News' editorial content from their 'journalism.' I'm sure this will all quickly devolve into a paid product placement scheme.

what hardware?

[bstil]

What hardware are they running it on?

Well, we know what hardware Slashdot is running on. At least, what hardware in June 2000...

Re:what hardware?

[Creepy Crawler]

For some reason, I think that the load on their ImageServer probably went DOWN after ads were being placed here..

Re:what hardware?

[FooAtWFU]

This is amusing... Nmap sez:

Interesting ports on slashdot.org (66.35.250.150):
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
Device type: PDA|broadband router|general purpose|router
Running (JUST GUESSING) : Linux 2.4.X|2.5.X (93%), Siemens embedded (86%), Draytek embedded (85%), FreeSCO Linux 2.0.X (85%)
Aggressive OS guesses: Linux 2.4.6 as on Sharp Zaurus PDA (93%), Siemens Speedstream 2602 DSL/Cable router (86%), Microsoft Xbox running Debian Linux 2.4.20 (86%), Draytek Vigor 2200e DSL router v2.1b (85%), FreeSCO 0.27 (Linux kernel 2.0.38) (85%), Linux kernel 2.2.16 (85%), Linux kernel 2.4.18 (x86) (85%), Linux Kernel 2.4.0 - 2.5.20 (85%), Linux Kernel 2.4.18 - 2.5.70 (X86) (85%), Linux Kernel 2.4.20 (85%)
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).

All right, guys! Running Slashdot off your PDAs and XBoxen! Imagine a Beowulf cluster! :)

Re:what hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

You tard. Slashdot runs behind a load-balancing firewall. You didn't get near their webservers. You just ended up nmaping their router and probably got your IP shitlisted, too.

Re:what hardware?

[FooAtWFU]

You tard. Slashdot runs behind a load-balancing firewall. You didn't get near their webservers. You just ended up nmaping their router and probably got your IP shitlisted, too.

... then how come I'm still posting? :)
In any case, I would be entirely unsurprised if I had just poked their firewall. Two of the suggested options for the OS type were, after all, "router" and "broadband router". And I don't really care that I didn't get their webservers... for the same reason that I disagree with the moderation on my post. It should be Funny, not interesting... a slightly padded Beowfulf cluster joke. =b

But we digress: mod me Offtopic, if you care to throw around the modpoints.

They still seem to be using Google for the images

[FooAtWFU]

Yahoo's image results still seem to be done through Google...

It's still google for me

[lennart78]

I just entered 'www.yahoo.com' into my browser to see what it looked liked nowadays. Yahoo is still positioning itself as a portal, and rams a bunch of ads down my throat before I had a chance to hit the back button.

Their search engine seems to be working fine (but slow, compared to google), and no image-based ads between the results.

War/Competition usually means improvement of usability of their respective products. I'm all for that...

Re:It's still google for me

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh, do search.yahoo.com

Thanks,

google - a verb

[stonebeat.org]

I tried to google around for more news on this topic but found nothing.

Yahoo/MSN vs. Google/Altavista

[commo1]

Has anyone really found a good use for Yahoo? Categorized searches are dangerous and not even remotely relevant, and the results encourage bad searching habits. I cannot count the number of times I have had customers and family members tell me thay could not find a webpage based on a Yahoo or MSN search even one week after the initial search took place. Case in point: "Hotel Italy Frommers" will bring up extremely different results than a Google or Altavista search. A week later, the relvancy has changed completely, because of the new structured relevancy and changing of categories/subcategories. A search of the same type on G/A will still eventually turn up the same page, given a few more relevant search terms. I have tried for years to steer people away from "MySearch" and "Yahoo/MSN"-type engines, to no avail, and that job is getting no easier by the day, due to pop-ups and spyware. Granted, the Google/Altavista searches will still do a graduated ranking based on trademarks and web-address relevancy, but at least they are not categorized, unless you are using their "directory" service, which intends to emulate Yahoo's structured searches. So: does the search engine really make any difference to the relevancy of searches for these types of search engines? For that matter, is the real-life relevancy of Google "directory" based searches really the result of the search engine, or is it based on the structure of the categorization schema?

Slurp...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo posted an FAQ about the crawler, called Yahoo Slurp, and said that it "collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for search services using the Yahoo! search engine."

Surely deserves a patent.

Slurp?

[byolinux]

Big Gulps anyone?

Competition is good

[rqqrtnb]

Just cause Google is currently the leader doesnt mean Yahoo doesnt deserve the chance to take the crown!

Would you prefer technology stagnate?

Good luck to the teams at both google and yahoo!

I dont believe in brand loyalty. Cause no company has believed in customer loyalty.

And the winner shall be...

[chamilto0516]

And the winner shall be the search engine that get's what I want somewhere in the first page of results. I know this is a combination of the following:

• Size: how many documents are in the index
• Ease-of-Use: how intuitive is it and how much functionality is there for me to specify what I am looking for (try putting TLA's in your search, can you opt out of blogs or include them, etc.)
• Rankings: how are the results ranked (tied to "Ease-of-use" above). Great the web page I want is on the 5th page. Trust me, 99% of us probably will give up before we find it.

When a web search says that it found 1.7 billion documents that might have what you need, your search criteria is not narrowed enough. An yes, when it shows that it found those 1.7 billion documents in 45msec, that is just some ego stroking.

Not quite rid of Google

[Tune]

> When will there be anything new from Yahoo!?

True. The front page still has that bloated good ol' Yahoo look-and-feel that caused the exodus to Google in the first place. It does not seem to be more responsive or more accurate either.
On top of that, did anyone notice they still seem to be using Google to retrieve images? At least, the result to searching for "$#@%" looks *very* familiar:

We didn't find any Web pages containing $#@%.

Suggestions:

- Check your spelling.
- Try more general words.
- Try different words that mean the same thing.

Also, you can visit the Yahoo! Search Help Center for more suggestions.

(I bet Google has those phrases trademarked, so they could sue Yahoo for providing useful clues... ;-)

In even bigger news...

[syzme]

Look! Look! Google has changed its look! Well, a little bit at least. Now there aren't colored backgrounds on the different search links on the front page, and there are gradient backgrounds for the headers of the various pages once you have searched. Wierd timing.

Re:In even bigger news...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are looking at a "bucket test", google like most big engines feeds a small number of its users into new designs to test if they work etc, they can have half a dozen new "designs" running under test at the same time.

coockies

[PhuckH34D]

At least their coockies dont last till 2032, but only till 15 april 2010 22:00:09 :)

Re:Oh yeah

[glpierce]

The sponsored links have a very odd system. Case in point: I tried a test search for (in quotes) in both Google and Yahoo!. Google gives no sponsored links for "cubital tunnel syndrome", one for "tunnel syndrome", and eight for "carpal tunnel syndrome" - all are relevant. Yahoo!, however, gives a sponsored link for carpal tunnel syndrome in a search for "cubital tunnel syndrome", three different links for a search of "tunnel syndrome", and eight for "carpal tunnel syndrome".

What's significant here? The search for "cubital tunnel syndrome" gives a sponsored link to a carpal tunnel syndrome site, despite the fact that it is not relevant, and the search terms were in quotes. More interestingly, that sponsored link does not appear in searches for "tunnel syndrome" or "carpal tunnel syndrome".

Something is wrong here.

Ya-who?

[kortex]

And this will affect 90% percent of searches made how?

Re:Ya-who?

[LostCluster]

I wouldn't call Lycos completely out of search, they own Hotbot.com, which at this point is the smoothest way to jump between the four out of the five major search engines left standing with AltaVista being the only holdout.

Re:Ya-who?

[gnu-generation-one]

"I don't know many who turn to Yahoo for their search results anymore."

And for a reasonably simple reason. It's been a long time since Yahoo announced that they'd only list websites who paid them, but I remember thinking, "if I can only search amongst websites who can afford to give Yahoo $100 per year, that's a fairly limited search"

no brainer

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that google took the domain "googlemail.com" Only a matter of time before yahoo did this no? Google seems to be moving towards a portal status, which would directly complete with Yahoo... so no surprises...

john

Too many features.

[rqqrtnb]

Y! should research how many of their features are currently used regularily by their users. IMHO, I do not think that cramming a web site with extra features does improve the user experience.

It is good to see that Y! is interested in iproving their services in many areas, but they should concentrate on some specific business instead of trying to get a part of the market in as many different business markets as possible.

Call me oldfashioned, or offtopic, or whatnot, but I miss the days when you could talk to some store owner who has been specialized in one specific field and who could give you advice based on his experience. Don't get me wrong, I know that such people still exist, but they are getting rarer if you compare to all the Wal-Martish stores that are "diversifying" their line of products and services. The same is seen online...

Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just searched Google and Yahoo about "yahoo slurp". Guess which one's more accurate? (also, it's plainly obvious that Google can withstand /., but can Yahoo?)

Re:Relevance?

[Dutch_Cap]

"(also, it's plainly obvious that Google can withstand /., but can Yahoo?)"

Well yes, because after all, yahoo is only one of the biggest sites on the internet, with a mere 105 million hits per day

Re:Relevance?

[Fishstick]

the real test?

more evil than satan

miserable failure

and of course...
litigious bastards

seems to work just fine!

Re:Relevance?

[LearnToSpell]

I love the third result:

more evil than satan himself
... for more evil than satan himself. Sorry, no results were found. ...
search.microsoft.com/...

Riiiiiight.

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

try 2 billion pageviews / day

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

who are you joking with? yahoo gets much more traffic than google! damn man, learn some history. http://www.alexa.com/ -> refer to top 100.

Re:Relevance?

[yoelst]

Let not to forget to search for the competitor Google Search Engine

Re:Relevance?

[da'covale]

Your point is?

Both had a relevant article on the second place.

Re:Relevance?

[unixformat]

Searching yahoo.com's search engine for yahoo search's user agent will always be a little more biased towards the competitor, due to the fact many websites great their visitors with "your using this browser, OS, user-agent" etc It is interesting comparing http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859 -1&q=%22Googlebot%2F2.1%22&btnG=Google+Sea rch with http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Googlebot%2F2. 1%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-pull-web-t&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt but it appears google still has the advantage.

Re:Relevance?

[randomrandom]

Try searching for: [best search engine]

Re:Relevance?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Google also give free email account? How many again?

Re:Actually...

[mgs1000]

Google pulls up a little more for the "the"-variant.

So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)

I do googles searches!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you find that information? I did a simple nslookup on that IP and came up with crawler14.googlebot.com...seems OK to me!

Re:I do googles searches!!

[way2trivial]

huh.. iplookup was my original source.

weird, I dove deeper.. different lookups show two different listtings, arin whois (http://www.arin.net/whois/) has both for that ip... ok, my question is answered.. sorry for the inconvenience

Competition is good ... and there will be more

[rm007]

Technology Review has a discussion of the coming rivals to Googol in this month's issue. One of them is an Australian outfit called Mooter which does some nifty clustering of results (somewhat familiar to those who remember Northern Light, once a web search engine, now a provider of enterprise search engines). They discuss several others, including efforts by Microsoft, but the general point is that Googol (and Yahoo and Alta Vista etc. before it) have shown the search business to be a very profitable area if you are the leader, so there are a lot of eager pretenders to the throne. Competition is good, web users will end up with better searching, whether from Googol or another provider.

Re:Competition is good ... and there will be more

[Kong99]

What he said, I submitted this link yesterday as a Story, but was denied! I'm 2 for 4 now... the shame!

I am going to begin testing results with some of these new search Engines against Google see if I find one that works better. Google was great but I would say for the past several months it's results have been subpar.

However, no Search Engine will ever have as good a name as Google!!

it has been going on for some time now

[termos]

I think you mean it has been going of for quite some time now.

Is it slurpalicious?

[HarveyBirdman]

In related news, Yahoo! Slurp will be integrated with a new, special section of Yahoo! Personals. Readers are invited to let their dirty little imaginations go wild.

just doesnt sound right

[Anonymous Coward]

Person1: Can you get me one of those premade essays from the intarweb?

Person2: Sure, no prob, i'll just slurp for it

Re:just doesnt sound right

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right; intarweb just doesn't sound right.

Ya-who?

[WebGangsta]

While I know many people who use Yahoo for their tools (email, domain services, website hosting, calendar, address book, groups, etc), I don't know many who turn to Yahoo for their search results anymore. Google (and to a lesser extent, MSN - due to their tight Windows/IE integration for the uninitiated who haven't changed their preferences) IS becoming the defacto search engine on the web for the masses.

I think website referral logs reflect this as well. Using the y2003 visitor report from one of the websites that I manage, over 50% of search engine referrals came from Google; a little over 10% came from Yahoo. Other reports that I've reviewed offer similar findings.

As for the "slurp" name, since its been a familiar crawler for years (Inktomi), Yahoo would risk alienating some websites/website managers who would have to go adjust their Robots files just for the new name. (And let's not mention those folks who don't know how to update the Webtrends crawler ini file or their browsercap.ini files...)

On a related note: at some point, those spam-artist "Submit Your Site to 300 Search Engines" folks will be put out of business. Other than the top 7 or so, what other search engines/portals would be considered "major"? Yahoo, Google, MSN, Altavista/Teoma, All The Web, Ask Jeeves, About (out-of-date half the time), Looksmart, DMOZ. (Heck, even Lycos pulled out of search the other day)

Re:Actually...

[jelle]

"So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)"

Hmm... Google finds a hit, but Yahoo comes back empty handed.

Guess who I think has the bigger database?

misinformation on paid inclusion

[bad-badtz-maru]

There seems to be some confusion as to what is meant by "paid inclusion". It doesn't mean that you pay to get your site listed higher. It means that you pay to get a specific page spidered more often. That's all. If you don't pay, your site still gets listed - and PFI sites don't rank any higher than non-PFI sites.

Re:misinformation on paid inclusion

[KFury]

Please give me a link where Yahoo says that paid inclusion doesn't get sites listed higher. Until you do, you seem to be stating your assumptions as fact.

Thanks!

Re:misinformation on paid inclusion

[bad-badtz-maru]

Please give me a link where Yahoo says that paid inclusion DOES get your sites listed higher.

I have paid inclusion on a variety of URLs and I assure you, it doesn't increase your rank. Not only that, if Inktomi detects spam techniques on the PFI URL, they will blacklist it from the indexes.

Copy?

[Cheo]

It just looks like a copy of Google, but with a horrible color scheme.

Re:Copy?

[arhca]

but it uses the same colour scheme as Google...?!

Yahoo+Inktomi+Fast+Altavista+Overture vs Google

[celerityfm]

Before Yahoo got to the point where they could "dump" Google, they bought up Inktomi, their old search engine results provider before Google and Overture, the biggest pay per click ad distributor next to Google in order get to the point that they could even compete with Google.

As far as relevancy is concerned, think about how relevant MSN's search results were and you've got an understanding for Inktomi's results-- MSN relied on them for their base result set (after the overture/looksmart advertisements).

But here's the key-- Yahoo picked up Overture, who had just purchased both Altavista AND AllTheWeb-- Altavista used to be a killer search engine, and AllTheWeb is the best, most relevant search engine next to Google.. so Yahoo has really got a fighting chance here. Good news for competition. But the fact that Yahoo had to purchase up so many assets is just a sign to how strong Google is.

Now, keep your eye on Microsoft.

Re:Yahoo+Inktomi+Fast+Altavista+Overture vs Google

[stry_cat]

I was wondering if anyone was going to mention alltheweb. While Google is my primary search engine, I more often than not end up on alltheweb.

If you combine alltheweb's results with Yahoo's directory browsing (by far better than google's johnny-come-lately attempt) then I might just have a new primary search engine.

Of course old habbits die hard. It took over a year for me to dump Yahoo in favor of google, so even if it is a lot better it will probably take a while for me to dump google

Re:Yahoo+Inktomi+Fast+Altavista+Overture vs Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Some day down the line: Google IPO.

The very next day: Microsoft Acquires Google in Hostile Takeover.

Gentlemen, start your search engines...

[LostCluster]

With Yahoo owning Inktomi and Overture, and Overture in turn owning both Alta Vista and AllTheWeb, this was a move that everybody could see coming. I even wrote about it about a month ago in my little blog.

In short, Yahoo's been on a quiet buying spree. Without attracting too much attention, they've aquired enough resources so that they no longer have any need to buy anything from Google, it's all available in-house.

So, Yahoo's out to take back its role as the #1 search site that Google took from it. Google for the first time in a while has a serious threat that's going to force it to improve just at at time where the result quality is starting to slip... this should be fun to watch.

Re:Gentlemen, start your search engines...

[WebGangsta]

SearchEngineWatch says that "today, both AltaVista and AlltheWeb continue to maintain separate indexes, and Yahoo isn't saying publicly whether this will change with the introduction of the new Yahoo Search Technology index."

Overture is a non-entity in this field, as most people do not consider paid-for search results as valid when considering whether a search engine returns accurate results or not. Paid results may be helpful and relevant, but they were purchased to be displayed alongside specific keywords anyway. Big whoop -- that just means better salespeople.

Yahoo will not be a player in the search market (with Inktomi/AltaVista/AllTheWeb) until they merge the three databases together AND clean up their search interface. One reason why Google thrives is that they have what is generally considered the best web interface ever: one text box and a submit button. You can't get confused. Searching for a person's phone number? Don't hunt for the "People Search" page, just type in their name. Want to track a FedEx? Don't go to the FedEx Tracking Search Page, just type in the tracking ID.

To paraphrase: "One input box to rule them all. One submit button to find it. One search engine to rule the world and on the Internet bind it."

Re:Gentlemen, start your search engines...

[LostCluster]

To paraphrase: "One input box to rule them all. One submit button to find it. One search engine to rule the world and on the Internet bind it."

Take a good look at the AltaVista.com and AllTheWeb.com web interfaces. They sure smell a lot like Google right now. It's very possible that this is just the first skrimish in the search wars... Yahoo may be the company's portal brand, but will their Google-killer product actually be launched under one of the other search engine brands they now own?

Re:Gentlemen, start your search engines...

[WebGangsta]

Yahoo may be the company's portal brand, but will their Google-killer product actually be launched under one of the other search engine brands they now own?

Is it in Yahoo's best interest to have more than one "competing" search site to go against Google? Wouldn't it be wiser for them to incorporate it all under the Yahoo! brand instead of the divide-the-eyeballs approach of having multiple search sites?

That would be like Pepsi trying to unseat Coca-Cola by releasing PoopsiCola and PopsiCola and PeepsiCola. All of these Pepsi variants may have taken 5% market share away from Coca-Cola each, but did they also dilute any of Pepsi's market share as well? (Perhaps this is a bad example.)

An in-depth comparison

[scifience]

I have written up an in-depth comparison of Google and Yahoo that compares the number of results that each provides as well as user experience. The link to it is: http://www.scifience.net/. I would have posted it directly here, except there are screenshots and other such things that can't be posted as a Slashdot comment.

Re:An in-depth comparison

[bad-badtz-maru]

Not exactly what I'd call "in depth" as it ignores the major issue that faces search engines today: relevancy.

Re:An in-depth comparison

[scifience]

No, it doesn't discuss relevancy much. I wasn't about to look through millions of search listings to confirm that every one was related. However, I did look through the entire listing for my site and every listing on both Yahoo and Google really was related in some way (contained a blurb about one of my applications, something about my site, etc.)

Re:An in-depth comparison

[bad-badtz-maru]

Do a search for something like "black pants" or "computer" and compare just the first two pages of results to get a good idea of which engine might have better relevancy.

I haven't done this, personally, but some sort of analysis of this might be a nice suppliment to your information.

Logging is fun

[Walkiry]

66.196.65.34 - - [17/Feb/2004:01:44:11 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 284 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/si; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"

66.196.72.42 - - [17/Feb/2004:01:44:14 +0100] "GET /psicop HTTP/1.0" 301 316 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"

66.196.72.42 - - [17/Feb/2004:01:45:25 +0100] "GET /psicop/ HTTP/1.0" 200 5476 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"

Sure enough, my site! is! now! on! Yahoo! including some pages that don't show up in Google (like the Psi Cop page mentioned up there). Interesting.

Re:Logging is fun

[LostCluster]

Eh, Slurp has been out for years, it's the been the crawler for Inktomi all along. What changed today was that Yahoo replaced Google results with Inktomi results, therefore drawing a lot more attention to what up until now had been an also-ran compared to Google.

Re:Logging is fun

[Walkiry]

Oh yeah I know, it's my webpage what has been live for just a couple of months ^_^

I found it funny that I got slurp-ed just yesterday and now Yahoo shows hits that didn't show up before when it was google-based.

Google for Vicki Phillips

[Moderation abuser]

She was the stunt double for Gena Lee Nolin and plays the Darak'na in most of the Sheena episodes. See if you can get a photograph of her sans makeup.

I wanted to see what she looked like under the makeup once, happened to have the laptop running at the time and fully expected to find a picture in seconds through Google. Nope. Eventually using other search engines turned up her photo and stunt information.

I've said this before but it's good that there's competition, Google isn't the be all and end all of search engines. It looks fairly wide but shallow.

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, couldn't you find something even more obscure as the ultimate example of Google's suckiness?

"Search for the name of the man in the background to the left of GW Bush in the third from the top holiday photo from their 1982 trip to the Kennedy Space Center! You won't get a single result! But MSN returned fiftyfive biographies and thirteen 1024x768 desktop images!"

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[benja]

Wow, couldn't you find something even more obscure as the ultimate example of Google's suckiness?

"Search for the name of the man in the background to the left of GW Bush in the third from the top holiday photo from their 1982 trip to the Kennedy Space Center! You won't get a single result! But MSN returned fiftyfive biographies and thirteen 1024x768 desktop images!"

Well, one of the points where a search engine really has to show its meat is in really obscure searches. I would be surprised if MSN Search came out as well as you say on such searches.

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey the first result I get is the following:

Vicki Phillips Nude Pics - Vicki Phillips Naked Videos
This site contains adult content such as: Vicki Phillips Nude , Vicki Phillips Naked Vicki Phillips Nude Movies, Vicki Phillips. ...
www.best-celebrities.net/Vicki_Phillips.html - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[Anonymous Coward]

The point I was trying to make was that it was ONE single, non-objective, and non-randomized search query. This is common knowledge in the area of mathematical statistics: given a large group (eg all possible search queries on all search engines), there will be freak (unexpected) cases; ie, Google will give worse results for som query, no matter how good it is compared to some other search engine.

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[droleary]

See if you can get a photograph of her sans makeup.

Trivially easy. A search on "Vicki Phillips stunt" turns up this on the first page. It has both her head shot and links to more detailed info about her. In this case, I'd say the problem wasn't on Google's end.

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[goethean]

Easy -- Jane Fonda.

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[Anonymous Coward]

"without makeup"

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[droleary]

"without makeup"

An ambiguous phrase, at best, in Hollywood. More to the point, I believe that the original poster was actually referring to the fact he didn't want her looking like this. Note that this, too, was easy to find with Google using "Vicki Phillips sheena". Maybe you, like the original poster, needs to take a class on how to use a search engine.

Re:Google for Vicki Phillips

[Moderation abuser]

Looks like the site has been crawled since I looked. Vicki Phillips stunt stunts sheena stuntwoman among others were all tried in many combinations.

Google worship

[DuncanE]

Have you actually tried the new yahoo?

It seems to return results different to Google, but they still seem relevant...

The slashdot crowd seems to of latched on to Google as the god of search engines and is ignoring the prossibility that a new search engine might actually improve on it....

Google is experimenting with design changes

[blorg]

I note that even the Overture ads are in exactly the same format as Google's AdWords. Interestingly, however, the last two Sunday evenings, Google.ie has been experimenting with a new design in which various elements are changed. The tabs are gone, replace with simple links, and the directory tab is removed, to be replaced with a link to more services. There are many more differences; the main search is now called 'Google Web' and dictionary words are indicated by the explicit word [definition] rather than just being a link. Everything is less blocky, and the ads are no longer in their own boxes but rather are in a long list to the right of the screen.

Re:Actually...

[kevin_ka]

I just watched the Part again and Yoda defently says: "Begun, the clone war has."
sry no this

Boy,these search engines sure have low self-esteem

[JBG667]

"Yahoo Sucks"
Yahoo - 7,510 responses
Google - 4,400 responses

"Google Sucks"
Yahoo - 992 responses
Google - 2,430 responses

reverse study

[Anonymous Coward]

Google about "google" results 41,600,000
Yahoo about "google" results 47,000,000

Now who is the winner. Apperently they are both cheering each other on.

Why YOU will use Yahoo

[Freedom Bug]

Once we have viable competitors to Google, savvy people will prefer the viable competitors. Why? Although Google has done a good job keeping ahead of the optimizers, the best way to avoid optimizers will be to use the competition. So unless you like your first 20 results to be filled with the commercial, optimized, sites, you may be better off using Google competition than using Google.

Bryan

Remember why they're doing it: "Paid Inclusions"

[theghost]

"Yahoo will...expand its use of paid inclusion."

You don't get the best results, you get the results they want you to get. I can't even see the real results on the screen when the search completes. I have to scroll down past the add for "Yahoo Shopping" and past the paid inclusions that have a sidebar of paid inclusions. Yahoo can kiss my ass.

...has begun???

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell... Doesn't anybody remember "Ask Jeeves"? The browser war has been going on for a _long_ time; it's just that Google has had a lockhold for so long that we forget.

Google it will continue to be

[xutopia]

Yahoo asks me for money to list my site on their directory. There seems to be a free way somewhere on the site but they hide it from me.

If enough people like me are so frustrated with Yahoo and not put their pages up on it then Yahoo will become more irrellevant than it currently is.

Typo in the title.. apologies to The Register..

[Channard]

Surely the title should be.. 'Yahoo! Switches! Search! Engines!'

Mod up parent

[ndege]

Mod up parent. I agree.

Need info?

[Docrates]

If you need more information about yahoo, go here.

Google

[ProstheticSwan]

I haven't ever used Yahoo. Before Google I used Alta-Vista. Never could stand all the ads on Yahoo...remindedme too much of AOL *Shudders* [IMG]http://www.ebaumsworld.com/forumfun/newbie.jp g[/IMG]

My favorite search engine

[Bendebecker]

Was altavista. Altavista was cool, it'd give 200 good results (okay, 100 good results, 100 junk). Unfortunately it rolled out with a *new* look that made it little more than a copy of yahoo - even looked like yahoo. Go there now and it looks like google. I don't know why but it seems altavsita has become the clone of whatever the top search engine for this month is. Yahoo on the other hand just decided to use the same search engine as google so why go to yahoo and not just google in the first place? Its good that we finally now have soem variety again in search engines on the net.

the search engine war has begun!

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

the search engine war has begun! Victory...victory you say?

Begun, the search engine war has

Press release

[piersk]

Press release (couldn't see it already) here

Tried Both, Google Wins

[FreeUser]

As for what is the "best tool for the job", you might want to actually take a look at the new Yahoo results instead of blindly pimping Google. It looks entirely possible that the current Yahoo/Inktomi algorithm returns results that are more relevant than Google's current algorithm.

I just tried it (being search-engine-agnostic myself, having used yahoo, altavista, a bunch of others I no longer recall, and now google), and I must say, Google still wins hands down.

When I search for something on the 'Net, I want results that reflect what I'm looking for, not those who have paid to have their SPAM inserted into the list of what I'm looking for, and thereby adding noise to my signal. Until Yahoo stops placing paid-for results in their search results, they will not be winning any market share from those who use Google, and the flow of folks who discover Google and disregard Yahoo will continue.

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[bad-badtz-maru]

Where did you get the erroneous idea that Yahoo offered paid-for-placement results? "Paid Inclusion" just means they spider your site every day. It doesn't affect the site ranking. If anything, the Inktomi results are more pure than google's. You need to consider the amount of adwords revenue google gets from ebay and amazon the next time you wonder why google is seemingly unable to do anything about the millions of pages of spam in their index that redirect to ebay or amazon.

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[KFury]

""Paid Inclusion" just means they spider your site every day. It doesn't affect the site ranking."

Are you sure about that? As part of the paid inclusion package, the publisher will:

"Receive detailed click-through reports with rank, query volume, and keyword capture"

I'd be very surprised if Yahoo doesn't give these sites a ranking boost, because a site that pays $10,000 a year to have 400 pages included in the index won't renew if they find that most of their pages are on the 3rd or later page of search results, and Yahoo won't want to lose that revenue.

There's nothing on Yahoo's site that says they don't bias results for those who pay, and you can bet if the search results were unbiased, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops, like Google does:

"Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank)."

Finally, if said publisher, after using paid inclusion, decides to not renew after a year's inclusion, their rank would go down. It would have to, or else why would they continue to pay Yahoo in the first place? Most product pages aren't updated every day or even every week, so paying tens of thousands of dollars for 48-hour updates isn't realistic.

If not paying for your link causes your rank to drop, then you're paying for placement.

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[bad-badtz-maru]

PFI doesn't raise your rank - period.

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[KFury]

"PFI doesn't raise your rank - period."

So then the only reason to spend $25/page/year is to make sure your content is current?

I don't buy it. Please provide evidence from Yahoo's site. If PPI doesn't raise your rank, there would be copy somewhere on Yahoo's site saying that their web results are unbiased.

Please find it and show us, instead of pretending that terse sentences equate to insider fact.

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[bad-badtz-maru]

It's not an insider fact, it's common knowledge for anyone who even remotely knows anything about search engines. It's not even something new, it's the Inktomi Paid Inclusion, which has been around for years.

Regardless, here's the URL:

http://www.positiontech.com/directsubmitfaq.htm#q8

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[KFury]

If Inktomi Paid Inclusion has no impact on your ranking, then why do you pay for it? I've looked at your site (I assume you're talking about subcultural.com) and it doesn't look like the info on your pages updates daily, so what do you pay Inktomi for?

If you stop writing checks to Inktomi, and as a result your rank goes down, then you are paying for rank.

Oh and your link is about Inktomi's syndicated search, not Yahoo's hybrid. Yahoo's search results are demonstrably different than stock Inktomi results, so again I ask if you have evidence that Yahoo doesn't boost for paid inclusion?

Thanks!

Re:Tried Both, Google Wins

[bad-badtz-maru]

I bought PFI originally to spider the siteindex so that all of the site's pages would be indexed. I doubt that I will renew.

And you're right - Yahoo is launching a separate, paid inclusion program aside from the Inktomi one. Of this I have no knowledge.

But with regards to Inktomi, I could deny the PFI spider today and I am positive my site's ranking would not be affected.

I officially hate the new Yahoo search engine

[dorward]

Search for 'Dorward' and what do I find at number one? My homepage... with the URI that has been sending a 301 Moved Permanently to another domain for half a year.

Bah. Google is at least reasonably upto date!

Re:I officially hate the new Yahoo search engine

[falsification]

I pretty much agree with the substance, but not the tenor of that remark. I'm seeing a lot of old stuff in Yahoo searches, even today, after the switchover.

Remember, though, that Yahoo has been addicted to Google's heroin for a long time. Yahoo's index is neglected and old. Give Yahoo a couple of months to build back their index. Then we'll see how good their search engine really is.

Try saying it out loud

[Anonymous Coward]

Without even considering the technologies, just think of the names... Saying "slurp it" in an office can get you fired, when "google it" has become a universally recognized term

A new entrant into the browser war

[victor_the_cleaner]

While all the focus has been on the super powers: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, a little known search engine called Serbia fired the first shot today.

During the press release announcing Yahoogoslavia's new search technology, their CTO, Franics Ferdinand, what hit in the face, and killed, with a pi algorithm.

The pi was launched by a Serbian coder, claiming victory for the common man. This blantant attack has upset the delicate balance of power and the combatants are quickly aligning themselves for a long drawn out trench war.

Switzerland is of course claiming neutrality, and the French are waiting to be occupied.

Re:Oh yeah

[redink1]

Pshaw, if you think that's bad, try doing a search for Dink Smallwood without quotes (its a relatively obscure computer game), and the common sponsored link is:

Adventure Big Dink Second Smallwood Compare rates and receive up to four mortgage quotes by completing a free online application at Nextag. Affiliate.
www.nextag.com

Not only does the sponsored advertisement make absolutely no sense at all, but it seems to relish in this fact by bolding the search words.

I suspect the Sponsored Results were written in Engrish.

Looks like Google to me....

[Alan]

Other than the URLs being different, lets see what's the same....

'cached' link - check

text ads on right - check

same color scheme - check

bold search terms in results list - check

highlight search terms in cached view - check

sponsored links on top - check (with more than the one or two that are given on google)

top menu bar for directory, news, etc - check

misspelling suggestions - check

Hmm..... looks like a carbon copy so far. New features?

add to my yahoo

view as xml (to suck down rss feeds)

The 'view as xml' is probably the most interesting to me, but other than that.... well, they've done a good job emulating/copying googles feature set, which is no small task I'll gather. But still....

Meh.

Google is Fuxor'd.. oh wait.. i'm not a troll!

[mumblestheclown]

Google should IPO NOW, because if they don't, they are in serious deep doo-doo.

Why?

Because when you a value a company, you value them on what they actually have that's valuable.

What google has that is valueable is 1) a great indexing technology 2) lotsa eyeballs 3) lotsa community goodwill.

1) is imitable. sure, it will take some money, but if you paid the world's dozen top guys in this sort of thing 5m each to come up with an equivalent system, they would. add another say 20m for hardware and bandwidth and you have the beginnings of a reasonable google clone.. for FAR less than what google's current pie-in-the-sky valuation is.

2) is malleable. people WILL change their surfing habits when the next best thing comes along. this has been demonstrated many times over the years.

3) is slipping. at the risk of being labeled a troll, i don't like google very much any more. for one, while still better than everything out there, the searches are now heavily influenced by all sorts of nonsense. for example, since I live in the UK but do business in the USA, I often look for suppliers of things in the USA. I havent found a good way to get around google's georgraphic targeting of search results (linked to IP) and thus google results are incredibly useless. worse, it seems that half of google results these days are for sites that are themselves auto-generated stupid link pages of indeteterminate purpose (some guy making some money somewhere out there by 'beating' google).

I am also a google advertiser--I spend i think $50/day on google ads. While my site has always been the most popular in its field with enthusiasts, I noticed that it didn't show up highly in the regular search results until I started paying for paid ads. I found this disconcerting, to say the least, since my understanding is that such a link is denied.

I can't complain about the actual ad servcie, except that, again, its inimitable. if we had 4 or 5 good googles, which is technologically and economically plausible, we'd have price competition on ads and "bs" competition in terms of people going to less cluttered and more honest-ranking engines more.

So go google, IPO now.. before somebody else understands that it would really not take much more than USD $50M to pretty effectively replicate your "3 billion" dollar company.

The "new" "Overture" search:

[illuminatedwax]

Here's a link in case you can't find it!
--Stephen

As long as Yahoo's results are relevant..

[herrvinny]

...I don't care how many pages it returns. People seem to forget that even though a search returns hundreds of thousands of results, you're only going to look at the first few pages, if even that. Relevance is the key here. I want my information, and I don't want to go deep sea fishing in the results pages.

SCO

[nick_marden]

Yahoo!'s search engine computes the correct 'top link' when you search for litigious bastards. Must be superior technology.

Interesting Find

[wholecake]

I just did a search in the new Yahoo search engine for keyword 'slashdot' and found this at number 8.


Quit Slashdot.org Today!

What a dumb site, who would ever think Slashdot is a plot by Microsoft to destroy the productivity of Linux users

Okay this is gonna take some explaining.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Why did the browser war happen. What did MS have to gain and why should we care.

MS doesn't seem to care about a lot of different programs made by third parties for the Windows OS. You don't see MS trying to compete with Photoshop and the like. 3D animation programs or IRC programs. So what is different with browsers.

Once the web was a total free for all. Everyone could run a site and everyone could visit them. This was in the days when universities owned the net. It was good and peacefull and cheerfull mess and it wasn't making a profit.

Some companies didn't like this and they wanted to create a different net. The PORTAL net. You would have a home page from wich you would start every browsing session and from there navigate to things that might be of intrest and more importantly things wich the Portal owner wants you to be intrested in. You will note no links to Linux distro's on MSN Portal. Yahoo doesn't link to MSN. Google does not have a link page to every other search engine.

The reason they wanted this was simple. Advertising. Control where a person can go or the links he sees and you can easily sell targetted advertising and surf behaviour. This was thought to be very big business indeed. Marketings wetdream.

So how to own the web. Well since most people are lazy and stupid the easiest way to get them to your portal and therefore your advertising and tracking programs is by making it the default page of the browser. The old netscape took you to the netscape portal site. IE takes you to MSN. Since mozilla no longer does it would be very fair to presume that netscape.com doesn't get the same amount of visitors anymore. How many people do you think use MSN search because it is the default?

But this whole advertising idea burst like a bubble didn't it? True but the browser wars happened before that.

Anyway there is a more sinister reason. MSN and IE may not be making MS money but that doesn't matter. It has stopped netscape.com from making money or even worse selling competing webservers (yes netscape has its own webserver product). Apache has stopped MS IIS (or iss) from taking total control since the MS is crap and Apache is free but ISS (or iss) is still selling because of its extra's (wich only work well with IE and .net).

In MS's book it is often not about winning but about stopping others from winning. Oh and not that MS is alone in this desire. It is just in a rather unique position. Wich other company do you know that controls such a large portion of its market?

So IE is given away for free because MS wants everyone to use it and not any competing products that might lead people to think that they might replace other bits of the computer software as well.

Re:Okay this is gonna take some explaining.

[Haeleth]

Google does not have a link page to every other search engine.

Maybe not every other search engine, but they do link to quite a lot of them...

Google's results have become very suspect

[rrlozano]

I'm in the camp that believes Google has cracked down on money phrases to force people to us their adwords. In my field, the SERPS are terrible. The top positions are irrelevant. Google has gone overboard in their attempt to filter out spam by tossing out basically any site that appears to be on topic. A shake up is good, Google controlling so much Internet commerce is bad for everyone.

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on... size doesn't matter...

it is all about how you index it.

Google is still better, for example in languages

[tetrode]

I live in Belgium, and yahoo does not provide me with www.yahoo.be. It has registered the domain, but it redirects to Yahoo france. WTF? I'm in the Flemish part, so they miss the boat there. In addition to that, Google allows me to search for pages from Belgium, or pages in Dutch/Flemish, while Yahoo seem to think that 5 million people can be ignored.

Well, we will ignore you then, Yahoo.

Mark

Compare the search results

[GoogleGuy]

Hi,

here's a small tool to compare the search results of Google and Yahoo.

Have fun.

Re:The search engine war .... is settled

[Anonymous Coward]

For the definiative answer go to yahoo and search for the "best search engine" Google gets the #1 spot and Yahoo is not even on the first page. Yahoo tells you google is the most relevant and those of us that use google already know google is the best. Debate settled :)

Way to copy the look of Google

[bogie]

Sorry if someone brought this up already, but man does Yahoo look exactly like Google for search results. Same tabs on the top. Big button for "yahoo search" instead of "google search". Same colors for links and domains. They have a cached option now. Pretty blantant Google rip-off.

Maybe its been this way for a while and I'm wrong here, but after doing a Yahoo search for the first time in years I can't believe how much it looks like Google.

Google Bombs

[Derkec]

I thought it'd be interesting to see how Yahoo handled 2 classic google bombs. "Miserable Failure" and "French Military Victories".

Miserable Failure:
History (as I understand it): There was an effort to link "miserable failure" to the white house biography of W. This happened after Gephardt declared Bush a miserable failure of a President. If the sites were bomb proof, we'd see articles relating to that major declaration high. If not we'd see the bomb's target high followed by the numerous right wing counter attacks against Michael Moore and others.
Google: Google's results are dominated by the bomb, but its fifth place mark gets a relevant article.
Yahoo: Also bombed, but has the article as its 1st link.

Winner: Yahoo

French military victories:
History:
The French military has had some victories, but not a ton. To mock them for not jumping on board on the whole blow up Iraq gig, somebody spoofed a google result to make it appear that there were no results but did you mean "defeats"? It got big.
Google: Totally overwhelmed by the bomb. It's top choice is the bomb target and everything else is people linking to the bomb, talking about it, or reporting on it. No non-bomb related historical pages for 100 hits as far as i could see.
Yahoo: Pretty much the same results. Although results 21 and 35 suggests Yahoo selling your search results. However, hit number 80 scored a paper on Napolean.

Winner: Yahoo by a hair.

Overall: Yahoo shows itself to be vulnerable to attacks targetting Google albiet slightly less so. It also appears to intentionally seed its results with crap you don't want. I'll stick to google for now.

Re:Google Bombs

[Kwil]

I guess the next aspect for study is how vulnerable Google is to Yahoo Bombs.

Of course, we're going to need someone to figure out how Yahoo's ranking system works before we can bomb it.

same problem than google...

[Frederic54]

search on yahoo for hyundai performance parts and get this link http://plaisirs.us/hyundai-parts-manuals.html which is not really about the kind of parts you are looking for :)

After all ...

[stuffduff]

After all, what can you expect from a company who describes itself as:

"A Couple of Yahoos"

Yay. More spiders.

[smartalecvt]

Just what we all need -- more spider traffic. I checked my forums this morning, and there were 3 guests browsing, all in the 66.196.64.0 - 66.196.127.255 range. Did a whois, and, bingo, Inktomi. I guess one spider per site just isn't enough.

Search for "search engine" on Yahoo

[89cents]

Google is first result, followed by AltaVista, Dogpile, Hotbot, Lycos, Ask Jeeves...

Yahoo search comes in at #14!

Re:Search for "search engine" on Yahoo

[Pooquey]

Google does not come up first in a list using the same search in its system either. http://www.google.com search: search engine results: Altavista Search Engine Watch: Tips About Internet Search Engines & Search ... My Excite Google Dogpile Lycos Yahoo ...

litigious bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else use Yahoo to search for "litigious bastards" ??

FreeBSD

[Espectr0]

The site m1.search.vip.dcn.yahoo.com is running unknown on FreeBSD.

I find it hard to believe they were using Google!

[Herschel Cohen]

The misinformation I have gathered from Yahoo, leads me to wonder what they are using on their phone search. For a specific instance: searching for a company and location where I previously had an assignment I found two numbers: the supposed main number and the library. In desparation I tried both multiple times on different days and times. Neither was ever picked up.

In contrast using Google, I found multiple web sites which lead me to the real main number - no resemblence to the number given by Yahoo. That number was answered immediately and I was given the number for the individual I was seeking.

Google is not perfect, even with the advanced search where I tried to limit the dates gave me links that were both old and inappropriate. Part may be due to their really going by the date of the citation (or link) rather than the publictaion date. Moreover, I too could be at fault for not knowing how to construct the optimal query.

I have another instance for Yahoo giving invalid information, however, another phone number search engine corrected their values only after giving identical results to Yahoo's. However, initially both phone numbers were out-of-date by over a year!

Absurd!

[splerdu]

The phrases used are far too general, to the point that they ought not to be copyrightable... Having all the phrases together might be a bit more questionable, but honestly i would give the same advise to anyone looking for better results on any search engine.

Imagine if a company trademarked
print "hello world";
and started charging for its use...

Re:Absurd!

[SoTuA]

Imagine if a company trademarked print "hello world"; and started charging for its use...

They would be laughed out of court as there are decades' worth of computer books with prior art.

Re:Absurd!

[orthogonal]

Imagine if a company trademarked
print "hello world";
and started charging for its use...

Look, if you're going to give SCO ideas, at least charge them $699.

Well I for one

[Salsaman]

...welcome our slurping overladies !

MOD PARENT UP, very! interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP, very! interesting

"Futurama Samples"

[Gannoc]

Try searching for that in google and then do it in yahoo. Looks like Yahoo has pulled ahead until the bastards figure out how to trick the crawler again.

Revenue... a lot of it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason for being #1: You're a loser if you're #2.

Google makes millions of dollars in revenue on their Google Search Appliances. If you think they come cheap... think again... a single blade is somewhere around $30k, and the midrange one (GB-5005) is around $230k. The big one (GB-8008) is probably another $100-200k above the the midrange one. And corporations are willing to pay, because they've already spent millions of dollars in putting information on the web, so another couple of $100k is just a blip on the radar screen.

And on top of that you got their small text ads, but that's just gravy on top for Google.

In case of Slashdotting...

[TuringTest]

Here is the Google cache for the site revised in the article. It even works! ;-)

Proof

[illuminatedwax]

You want proof that Google is better?
Do a search for "pretend robot pants" (without quotes!) on each.

QED.
--Stephen

Re:Proof

[calyptos]

that's awsome. I liked google before, it was the only search engine I could stand using. But I didn't know it was that much better, thanks!

Where have you been?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun!"
Where have you been? From where I sit, it started in the summer of 1995 with the birth of Altavista at DEC. Shortly thereafter, Yahoo and the rest came along, and it was on.

It only became newsworthy recently with Yahoo's then Googles surge into mainstream conciousness.

This is just another offensive in very long history of the search engines trying to out-index each other and the marketing maggots trying to get better rankings via SEO spam : )

It is search engines against each other and the SEO marketers. Spy vs. Spy

Re:TEH n-th ps0t!

[Anonymous Coward]

it's ps0t, you insensitive clot!

Thanks, I stay with Google

[axxackall]

Just tried to find how to solve the problemof connecting AIDE (Intruder detection Software) to PostgreSQL, using two keywords: "aide" and "postgresql".

Google found me answers right on the first page, which was full of mail-lists, linux forums and FAQs.

Yahoo found for me autoparts, garage services, camping bungalow - and just few (still useless and unrelated!) tech links.

Check yourself if you don't believe. Personally - I stay with Google. Yahoo has just proved who is the spammer around here.

Google has defined web interface standards

[blorg]

There's an interesting article on ZDNet from November that takes as its angle that Yahoo deliberately set out to emulate Google's interface. The thing is, a lot of Google's design innovations (differentiating of text ads into coloured boxes, etc.) have now become web standards, and it pays (for users) that these are consistent across the web. Thanks to Google's innovation, I can recognise a coloured box as an ad, whether it's on Google or Yahoo. I just hope that they have sense, unlike Amazon, to not go around sueing everyone who does something similar.

The Googol test

[K-Man]

(slashdot is not Googol-friendly, so I have to post this in Extrans mode)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U TF -8&q=100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000

Searched the web for 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0. Results 11 - 20 of about 121. Search took 0.17 seconds.

(not bad, gets a number of math sites)

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-pull-web-t& p= 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0

We didn't find any Web pages containing 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0.

Suggestions:
- Check your spelling.
- Try more general words.
- Try different words that mean the same thing.

--

Well then, I guess it's true. Yahoo really isn't serving up any Googol search results.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Your content is a bunch of affiliate links. Your sole motive is $. Sites like this should be banned from all engines and directories. Since all you're trying to do is make money, and you are providing no service or useful information, what good would it be to the Internet community for people to waste time on your site.

An apropos article in Technology Review

[BrewerDude]

Just last night I was reading this article in Technology Review. It talks about the up-and-coming competitors to Google. A little light on the technical details, but a good read none-the-less.

Quit complaining about search engines and adverts

[JaF893]

First of all search engines cost us nothing. Secondly it possible to do decent academic research. Go to Yahoo advanced Search and go to the Site/Domain section then to the only search in this domain/site form. Then simply type in ".edu .ac.uk .org" now that wasn't too hard was it?

in search of "Search Engine"

[X-Rayden]

search on google for "search engine" ... see the position of google in is own search... and yahoo... Google is 4th on is own search, and 1st in the yahoo one... Yahoo is 14th! on is own search and 7th on the google one... lol

Debian results are like Spam

[Rick Richardson]

A while back, Google had a severe problem with links to Debian release notices and changelogs, etc. swamping the legitimate links to project home pages and really relevant sites. It was pretty awful, and I complained. Today, Google is much better in this regard, but still far from perfect.

Yahoo, as it is currently, is worse than Google w.r.t. the Debian spam links. I'm going to email Yahoo about this and see if they do anything about it.

Google seemed to care about this link spam, now lets see if Yahoo does as well.

-Rick

Actually, Google improved a lot a few days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it was becoming spammers' paradise. I'm a frequent searcher of a, hmm, specific kind of pornography, and had given up google since it was falling victim to faux-html dynamically-generated pages.

God, the new Google is heaven for us, fans of, hmm, fringe porno, and I would guess it's better than just last week for most kinds of searchers.

If! there's! one! thing! I! hate! about! yahoo!

[ColaMan]

It's! their! highly! irritating! use! of! the! exclamation! mark! in! their! name! and! all! their! propaganda!

Kind of like Divx;-).

Sorry. Sorry.

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet poland, reverse notation speaks you.

Yahoo search result link goes to a yahoo redirect

[Jemm]

Google returns search results with links that take you directly to the site whereas yahoo's links point to a yahoo script which then redirects you to the correct url. I have to presume that there is some sort of data kept about which links are clicked on. To see what I mean, hover over a google search result link and look at the url in the status bar, now do the same on Yahoo.

Now if this is used in agragate only to improve search result effectiveness, I'm all for it, but somehow a little warning bell goes off saying otherwise.

I also see tremendous potential for missuse here. Companies wishing their site to appear on top for certain key words can figure out the yahoo redirect get script. For instance:

a search for the word slash currently returns slashdot.org as link number 6. If someone hammers yahoo with a url like
http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=slash/v=2/SID=e/l =WS1/R=6/SS=7079471/H=1/*-http://slashdot.org/
then yahoo will probably asume that slash should move up in the ranks.

But say we search for "asdfg" where slashdot does not appear. We then make a url to put slashdot in the listing something like
http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=asdfg/v=2/SID=e/l =WS1/R=6/SS=7079471/H=1/*-http://slashdot.org/
we can probably put slashdot in a category where it really has no relevance.

yahoo search engine uses multiple databases

[perler]

i just foud a site i redesigned lately twice in the search results. one version with the old title, and description, one with the new one - so i think they put together two databases (googles and there own?)

PAT

I think this is a very good change

[GoldMace]

Maybe it will mean that the results will actually be different. Quite a few search engines are "powered by Google" What's the point? If I want Google, I go to google.com. If I go to a search engine other than Google, it's because Google isn't giving me the results I want.

I actually kind of miss the days BEFORE google, where you could go to different search engines and get a different top 20.

Kartoo

[amembleton]

Have you tried Kartoo?

Its slow, because its based on Flash, but its pretty neat at grouping results. I prefer Google and Yahoo for quality of search results though. I have to say, Yahoo is suprisingly good :) - Go competition.

Yahoo is becoming like Microsoft

[leoaugust]

I will always prefer Google over Yahoo because of what Yahoo did to me in its other "portal properties" specifically the Mail system. Yahoo is becoming downright mean to extract money from its users. It is starting to create inconveniences like Microsoft owned Hotmail does. And I would prefer Google just to spite them.

I had an account under leoaugust11 at yahoo created long time ago where I had stored a lot of my emails. When it got sufficiently full, I reduced using it and created another account. I went to it yesterday and got a message that all mail has been deleted as I did not login in it for 4 months. Never got a warning. They didn't give me a chance during any login telling me that the rules had changed so better login. Nothing. I just go there one day and there is nothing. Why?

At least Hotmail advertised these limitations and that is why I never keep a Hotmail account. Fair and square. Tomorrow if they try to sell me something I will give them a listen. To Yahoo - No.

I am so angry that I will probably avoid Yahoo Search because failures in its Mail property. Google is focussed, and I think that is where they win.

Winning browser war = money?

[zoney_ie]

To be honest, I think the whole browser war thing, and MSIE's grasp for world domination is about control. Thereafter, perhaps there's potential to make money out of it. But first and foremost in the mind of Microsoft with their IE and Media Player "shove-it-down-your-throat"ness is control I am sure.

Duplicate Results

[saberworks]

I searched for "jedi knight" and the results listed duplicate sites. First, it would list www.jediknight.net and then jediknight.net and thier caches were duplicates, too. How smart is a search engine that can't figure out dupes?

It's not a war...

[generationxyu]

no more than it's been a war between men and ants.

That's new news!

[SphericalCrusher]

I've heard that Yahoo helped Google a pretty good but, and I've heard that Google did it all on their own. Nonetheless, Google is #1 -- not Yahoo. Another reason is that they were probably not getting noticed that they are even apart of Google; I didn't know until pretty recently that they were. Maybe not even Google knows they were? o_O Yahoo: "Yeah, we're leaving." Google: "Who the fuck are you?" No one knows.

Re:Four schoolgirls accused of raping deaf boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you submit this to FARK?

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

> Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun!"

I for one am glad. It seemed to me that Google was getting a little too much power.

In the ideal universe, there would be at least 5 or 6 truly comprehensive databases (with a minimum of 5 gigaitems each) competing against each other, all using different technology.

And for good measure, they should all support a standard XML interface to easily allow multi-searching that can combine multiple result sets into one.

"My search can outsearch your search!"

[crashnbur]

"Hey, it seems the search engine wars have begun!"

I love my Google Toolbar and Deskbar. In the last two years, Google's search capabilities have expanded to Google Groups, Google News, Google Image Search, and then some... The Google Services & Tools page lists more than a dozen top-quality, um, services and tools that perform equally as well as or better than most similar entities available elsewhere on the web.

That said, I don't know if there's much to this "search engine war" of which you speak. Then again, bigger wars have started over smaller matters, and competition tends to bring out the best in things (until something completely takes over).

Different yet the same.

[be11o]

I find it ironic how simular Yahoo! and Google now look. Take for an example Yahoo! 'Sponsored Links,' is that not the exact colour Google uses? I look forward to hearing a reflection of this by Google.

OT, but this is slashdot

[Kelz]

Google Rocks! (Would an SCO google have Johnie Cocharan on the front?)

Re: Yahoo are BSD based?

[wonk]

Not really surprising. Yahoo are long time supporters and users of FreeBSD so it would have been relatively easy to get their code to run on OSX.

Google "IPO" on Google and get...

[Anonymous Coward]

News: "Possible Google IPO Closely Watched - Atlanta Journal Constitution - 1 hour ago"

Hmmmm...

wrap-up

[falsification]

Well the thread is wrapping up and again the discussion was pretty boring. We can do better, people. We can do better.

A couple of big points that were unspoken AFAICT:

• Yahoo competing again in the search engine market is good. Yahoo has the financial resources to play ball with Google and MSN. With three real competitors, none of them can get away with mediocrity anymore. (Yahoo now owns Inktomi, Teoma, Ask Jeeves and lots of other name brands.)
• Yahoo will be building back its index over the next couple of months. They will also continue to tweak their algorithm. To help Yahoo get back on its feet, we should run lots of searches through Yahoo for a while. The search examples will give Yahoo the data it needs to improve.
• No one mentioned that lots of people login at Yahoo, and nobody logs in at Google. Presumably, Yahoo could use their already-existing cookies to target search results more effectively. OTOH, this could result in privacy invasions. Google does have its own infamous cookie, but it does not necessarily carry personal ID information on it.
• Somebody said Google screwed up by not issuing their IPO already. Good point.
• Somebody else said Google (via Blogger) is adopting Atom while Yahoo is sticking with RSS. I wonder what MSN will go with.
• Lots of small search engines, like Scrub the Web still exist. Their indices tend to be small. It must take several tens of millions of dollars in capital to get in the search engine game in a major way.
• Why hasn't anyone tried a different search engine business plan? Instead of trying to trick users into coming to your site and clicking on ads, how about charging a subscription fee to search ad-free? It would be like Northern Light, except it would index the whole web.
• Why don't we have semantic searching yet? I want to search web pages with "location:belgium" or "year:1999."
• The search engines are missing out on a big market: blogs. The blog search engines like Bloogz have an interesting niche to develop all by themselves.
• Perhaps Google's Page Rank feature is overrated. Why not index words immediately before and after those that are linked, not just the link words? Wouldn't that increase search result relevancy?

I'm looking forward to better results on all of the engines.

Yes! Very! Cool!

[rixstep]

I! am! all! for! competition! so! I! think! this! is! very! cool! and! wish! Yahoo!! all! the! luck! in! the! world!!

(Hey, can anyone lend me some exclamation points please? I'm all out.)

The other 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

At least 80 out of the other 90% of the Y! traffic is teenyboppers checking their "Yahoo! Mail."

I know because every college and high school student I know (I'm 20) uses either Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail for their primary e-mail account. Or both. And they check it every day.

The #1 sign of cluelessness: @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com.
-Dan

porn pic search

[Anonymous Coward]

WebGoggles.com is my search engine of choice

Relevant Simpson's Quote

[bezuwork's friend]

With this action by Yahoo, think the Simpsons got it right?

Automated voice: For automated stock prices, please state the company name.

Homer: Animotion.

Automated voice: Animotion. Up 1 1/2.

Homer: Yahoo!

Automated voice: Yahoo. Up 6 1/4.

Homer: Huh? What is this crap?

Automated voice: Fox Brodcasting. Down 8.