Yahoo! Switches Search Engines 395
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!"
Result relevance (Score:5, Interesting)
Innovation? (Score:1, Interesting)
Wonder if it's Linux boxen? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Didn't.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I love Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Thank you.. (Score:5, Interesting)
searches (Score:4, Interesting)
nice page (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
They still seem to be using Google for the images (Score:2, Interesting)
It's still google for me (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for what is the "best tool for the job", you might want to actually take a look at the new Yahoo results instead of blindly pimping Google. It looks entirely possible that the current Yahoo/Inktomi algorithm returns results that are more relevant than Google's current algorithm.
Not quite rid of Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Oh yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting ports on m1.search.vip.dcn.yahoo.com (216.109.117.133):
(The 1656 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
Device type: general purpose
Running: Apple Mac OS X 10.1.X
OS details: Apple Mac OS X 10.1.5
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't believe that improving their service is a necessity here. Simply providing something roughly equivalent is probably OK. Most users never knew that Yahoo search and Google were the same thing, despite the "powered by Google" logo next to it. A very talented network guy commented to me the other day that he preferred using Yahoo search to Google since he got similar results without Google's advertizing. He was stunned when I pointed out the obvious reason for this.
But the real reason for the switch has nothing to do with providing an improved service: they are either making more of a profit with their own engine than by licensing Google, or believe that they will in the near future.
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the job in this case is "Make money." Google has all these ethics things that get in the way of that. Things like not resorting their main search results order to include paid results, always putting advertisements in color. Advertisers don't like that.
It's kind of weird.. The way I look at it is this: Guys always want the virginal girl.. but they don't want her to stay a virgin around them. Advertisers want a search engine just like that. They want a search engine that everyone respects, except they want to underhandedly move their results up to the top.. which loses respect. Google does everything it can to keep the respect. Sure, for a few dollars, it might let you feel it up, but if you go around claiming that you shagged it, it goes and changes its entire rating system and drops your pages to the bottom of its list.
Google frickin' rules.
Relevance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)
Ya-who? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [searchenginejournal.com] the other day)
Re:what hardware? (Score:1, Interesting)
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!
Yahoo+Inktomi+Fast+Altavista+Overture vs Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Gentlemen, start your search engines... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
An in-depth comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
Logging is fun (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp".. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
My favorite search engine (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ya-who? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Logging is fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is Fuxor'd.. oh wait.. i'm not a troll! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Tried Both, Google Wins (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo+Inktomi+Fast+Altavista+Overture vs Google (Score:3, Interesting)
If you combine alltheweb's results with Yahoo's directory browsing (by far better than google's johnny-come-lately attempt) then I might just have a new primary search engine.
Of course old habbits die hard. It took over a year for me to dump Yahoo in favor of google, so even if it is a lot better it will probably take a while for me to dump google
Re:The search engine war has begun? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...)
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [webmasterworld.com]
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.
Okay this is gonna take some explaining. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I can picture the board meeting (Score:3, Interesting)
all the google love in this place.. sheesh, the algo has fallen apart over the past year, teoma.com [teoma.com], alltheweb.com [alltheweb.com] and now, likely, yahoo.com [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.
Google Bombs (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I find it hard to believe they were using Google! (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Re:is it just me... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:is it just me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Result relevance (Score:2, Interesting)
It's interesting that you found Y!'s search results useful. The inktomi algorithm seemed to heavily favor keywords in URLs, meaning it would be easy to take advantage of Y!'s search engine.
One reason why Y!'s results may have seemed legit is because it's new territory. No one knows how to optimize for Y! - yet.
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:3, Interesting)