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Yahoo! Switches Search Engines

Posted by timothy on from the look-this-way dept.

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!"

9 of 395 comments (clear)

  1. Yahoo has been planning this for ages by naoiseo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. search results design by bstil · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  3. Yahoo is Inktomi by Soukyan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. misinformation on paid inclusion by bad-badtz-maru · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen? by ravydavygravy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  6. Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google by Popageorgio · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yahoo has far more traffic than Google: Alexa says so.

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

  7. Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google by martijnd · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google by claar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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..

    --
    I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
  9. Compare the search results by GoogleGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi,

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

    Have fun.