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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
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
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.