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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!"
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...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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!? (@#$%)
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
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
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.
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.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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.
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.
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!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yahoo's image results still seem to be done through Google...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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...
> 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...
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.
G
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?)
So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)
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)
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!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
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.
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.
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)"
/psicop HTTP/1.0" 301 316 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"
/psicop/ HTTP/1.0" 200 5476 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)"
66.196.72.42 - - [17/Feb/2004:01:44:14 +0100] "GET
66.196.72.42 - - [17/Feb/2004:01:45:25 +0100] "GET
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.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
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?
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
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.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
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.
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.
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...)
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
>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.
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.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
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".