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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!"
I think you mean, "Begun, the search engine war has.".
or does a webcrawler named "slurp" sound like something more appropriate for booble.com?
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.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
But the morning is young.
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
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!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
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!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
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
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.
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.
Or not.
..., Google, etc.
I mean this is just another stop along the way which has brought us the original Yahoo! directory, Altavista, Inktomi, Hotbot, Metacrawler, MSN Search,
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.
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."
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! 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.
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
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.
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.
/. article at least:
Here's by the way the press release, which I think should have been linked to from the
Yahoo Press Release
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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!
Free XBox, PS2
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
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.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
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...
Reverse Polish Notation, he speaks in.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
> 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
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...
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..
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? :)
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.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
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)
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.
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!
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I just watched the Part again and Yoda defently says: "Begun, the clone war has."
sry no this
"Yahoo Sucks"
Yahoo - 7,510 responses
Google - 4,400 responses
"Google Sucks"
Yahoo - 992 responses
Google - 2,430 responses
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
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.
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
Surely the title should be.. 'Yahoo! Switches! Search! Engines!'
If you need more information about yahoo, go here.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
Yahoo!'s search engine computes the correct 'top link' when you search for litigious bastards. Must be superior technology.
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.
Are you sure about that? As part of the paid inclusion package, the publisher will:
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:
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.
Kevin Fox
Come on... size doesn't matter...
it is all about how you index it.
Hi,
here's a small tool to compare the search results of Google and Yahoo.
Have fun.
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.
Google is first result, followed by AltaVista, Dogpile, Hotbot, Lycos, Ask Jeeves...
Yahoo search comes in at #14!
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!
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.
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.
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.