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

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

[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

[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..

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.

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!

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: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.

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.

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: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: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

Compare the search results

[GoogleGuy]

Hi,

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

Have fun.