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!"
The search engine war has begun? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The search engine war has begun? (Score:5, Funny)
How can you speak if you haven't got a brain?
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...)
Relevance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Relevance? (Score:4, Funny)
"(also, it's plainly obvious that Google can withstand /., but can Yahoo?)"
Well yes, because after all, yahoo is only one of the biggest sites on the internet, with a mere 105 million hits per day
Re:Relevance? (Score:5, Funny)
more evil than satan [yahoo.com]
miserable failure [yahoo.com]
and of course...
litigious bastards [yahoo.com]
seems to work just fine!
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Funny)
it is all about how you index it.
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Informative)
sry no this
Re:The search engine war has begun? (Score:5, Funny)
Star Wars leads to quotes.. quotes lead to puns...
Puns lead to funny mods.
Much to learn, have you.
Re:The search engine war has begun? (Score:4, Funny)
I can just see the Yahoo CEO addressing his legions of web crawlers, proclaiming, "A New Power is rising! It's victory is at hand."
There will be no IPO for Google...
is it just me... (Score:5, Funny)
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 intern
I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
My mother uses the Google toolbar and knew about it w/o me telling her. My father refuses to use anything other than Google as his homepage.
My number one reason for believing that Google is the all important, #1 search engine: My girlfriend's parents said, "I'll just google for it." at dinner one night (and this is a family where they have a shortcut to every file on the desktop and they use AOL 6.0).
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a big deal either, since there's a goof chance my parents won't take notice the new bar anyway
It is sad that you have to question every motive and move you make on the Internet thanks to all the toxic waste that is present. One wrong subscription and your inbox is hosed. I made that mistake the other day. Fortunately, I used a throw-away [spamgourmet.com] e-mail address so the damage was minimal.
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.
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:5, Informative)
For some reason, whenever I run across machines that have the Yahoo Search bar, this lovely "Search Assistant" thing that gives extra pop up windows when searching is on the machines as well..
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:5, Informative)
But under 10% of Yahoo's traffic goes to their search sections: Again, Alexa [alexa.com].
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:3, Informative)
Nonetheless, among search engines it's second only to Google in driving traffic to my site (ok, some people block the referrer, but not many). It isn't much, but it beats the rest of the crowd (Google brings ~45% of all traffic, Yahoo 3.4%, then MSN with 1.5%).
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo's Google results were always a mess... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google (Score:5, Informative)
My European websites obtain 90% of their hits from Google.
My Chinese/Japanese language sites obtain 90% of their hits from the local Yahoo.
The browser wars are far from over outside of the ASCII 1-128 area.
..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp".. (Score:2, Funny)
But the morning is young.
Re:..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp".. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Result relevance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Result relevance (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Result relevance (Score:5, Insightful)
The more there are the harder it is for the people trying to distort the results to succeed in distorting all of the various methods.
Google for Vicki Phillips (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Somewhere, on the deck of the USS Yahoo! (Score:4, Funny)
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!
Re:Somewhere, on the deck of the USS Yahoo! (Score:3, Funny)
Yahoo has been planning this for ages (Score:5, Informative)
I still have google results, but can see the new ink results by appending &tmpl=E088 on the end of the SERP url.
I can picture the board meeting (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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
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:Wonder if it's Linux boxen? (Score:3, Informative)
Since you ask... I'm sorry that I cut this off to begin with, but when I ran nmap -P0 -O search.yahoo.com:
Starting nmap 3.48 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-02-18 10:06 EST
(The -P0 is necessary because the local university firewall blocks all incoming and outgoing pings.)
I don't own a Mac, and I don't know anyone who owns a Mac... and I
Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the paper from 98 that describes the PageRank algorithm (as used by Google) can be found here [nec.com]
Theres a simple explanation of various indexing/ranking schemes here [searchenginewatch.com], but if you really want to get up to speed on research into searching the web, try looking at some of the papers from the TREC Web Track [csiro.au]
Happy reading,
Dave
Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen? (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't think that they would have to replace the hardware but you never know. With the power of todays even bargain machines, I suspect that the bottleneck would be the bandwidth. I could be mistaken though.
I sat in on a short talk by a guy from google. From what I remember, google has several starting pages for their crawlers. They
Re:Wonder if it's Linux boxen? (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone know?
I would imagine someone does, yes.
Didn't.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Didn't.... (Score:5, Funny)
Did you try googling [google.co.uk] for it?
I love Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I love Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I love Google. (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm by selling services to corporations and little text ads. Googles advertising model is a very good way to make money on the internet by servicing both types of customers well, the normal google user and the advertisers.
Why, well the text ads are unobtrusive and obvious as advertisement links, and often welcome by the searcher. Why are they welcome, because they relate directly to the search term used. So you search for widgets, and widget inc. pays to put themselves on the first search page. The company gets trade, and the customer gets what they are looking for. In the real world this is the equivalent to the yellowpages directory where companies pay money to be listed with a small advert under a relevant indexed title like plumber or something.
So why does google have to be number one, because the more eyeballs they have the more money they can charge for an ad and the more companies that will be clamouring to get their little ad link under the "widgets" search term. Again for the yellowpages, in the US ever seen those ads from one or the other yellowpages directory saying that they are the preferred yellowpages by consumers, they are advertsising to potential advertisers in their directory implying that you will get the most value if you advertise in our directory and not the competitions. Same reasons google needs to be number one to maximise their profit.
Re:I love Google. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I love Google. (Score:3, Insightful)
Being the most popular browser on the net means that you can add your own extensions to it, and a lot of people designing websites will cater towards that. If you don't release IE for other platforms, people who don't use your OS
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 me
Flawed idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Flawed idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you, but that doesn't happen with google?
Not overtly, at least. Google doesn't let people pay for higher placement in their regular search. Paying Google advert money just gets you better placement next to the search results. Google searches do come up with a lot of junk, but you know at least they're trying to minimize it. To create a bizarre, tortured analogy:
Google: "We promise not to crap on your lawn. Others might be following us, and they might crap on your lawn, but we'll try to get rid of them if we can. Any crap we're paid to show you, we'll display it on the sidewalk for you and you can decide whether you want it or not."
Yahoo: "We're gonna crap on your lawn. Good luck trying not to step in it."
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.
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.
Re:Tried Both, Google Wins (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? As part of the paid inclusion package [yahoo.com], 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 [google.com]:
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.
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.
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really Google's fault there. That just shows how ebay and amazon are agressive marketers. In addition to paying for google ads, amazon has a bizarre affiliate-type program that basically replicates their pages on other people's sites, essentially spamming ALL search engines. How many times have you popped up results for a word combo or phrase that happened to appear in someone's amazon review and gotten the same damn thing, on different sites, over and over? This [google.com], for example, is what I got when I was looking for hacks to the REB1200 ebook reader. I'm sure google would kill that crap if there was an easy way. For the time being I suggest just picking an unusual word from the offending amazon review and exclude it, like this. [google.com]
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How does this improve Yahoo!? (Score:5, Insightful)
To simplify: We have Gnome and we have KDE, we have Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, we have Perl and Python. Would you like a world where everbody used Windows, or everybody said that Perl was mandatory? Or to live in a one party state?
Maybe Yahoo! and MSN's new search engines won't be of Google quality in the beginning, but I guess they'll catch up. We should cheer them on. Google's starting to get a position where they actually can (if they want, I'm not saying they are) control the flow of information. So my position on this is that the more search engines, and the more equal they are both in capabilities and market share, the better.
Ugly (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Marketing dept. (Score:4, Funny)
search results design (Score:5, Informative)
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 is Inktomi (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo's Own Search (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [cdgoround.com]
Didn't Yahoo use Inktomi in the past? (Score:4, Informative)
Here's by the way the press release, which I think should have been linked to from the
Yahoo Press Release [yahoo.com]
yeah, who does googles searches. (Score:2)
whatismyip.com is a nice page that tells you your ip. Google's cache for that page at
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U TF-8&q=whatismyip.com shows the machine that indexed it was at 64.68.82.168 which IP lookup traces ultimately back to http://www.cwusa.com/ a microsoft centric company with ip, hosting and data services.. what is google's database holding a record that originated from there-- any theories?
Thank you.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thank you.. (Score:3, Insightful)
searches (Score:4, Interesting)
Results (Score:5, Funny)
Searching for Yahoo on Google [google.com] comes up with 119 million hits.
Google got depth
Yahoo can't even search its own kind!
Re:Results (Score:3, Funny)
site:yahoo.com [google.com] on google yeilds 14,100,000
while
searching site:yahoo.com [yahoo.com] on yahoo only yeilds 7,580,000
(Side note: yahoo's url is also longer, this will take more time to type in on IE
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.
Yahoo had a search engine?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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:Ya-who? (Score:4, Interesting)
misinformation on paid inclusion (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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
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:Logging is fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Why YOU will use Yahoo (Score:4, Informative)
Bryan
Need info? (Score:4, Funny)
My favorite search engine (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like Google to me.... (Score:3, Informative)
'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.
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.
Compare the search results (Score:5, Informative)
here's a small tool to compare the search results of Google and Yahoo [googleguy.de].
Have fun.
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.
"Futurama Samples" (Score:3, Informative)
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.
wrap-up (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [scrubtheweb.com] 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 [bloogz.com] 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.Re:Surely you mean (Score:5, Funny)
Reverse Polish Notation, he speaks in.
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.
Competition is good ... and there will be more (Score:5, Informative)