Okay, Yahoo! is known for its high-quality and well-organized Web directory. But when you use Yahoo!’s Web Search feature, you bypass the directory entirely and instead retrieve results supplied by a third-party search engine. That’s right. When you use the search box on Yahoo!’s home page, you’re not searching Yahoo!—you’re searching Google. For some time now, Yahoo! has supplemented its directory listings with results from a partner search engine. Early on, Yahoo! offered results from the Inktomi search engine. Today, Yahoo! uses results provided by Google.
The contract that Yahoo! has with Google is not open-ended, which means that when the current contract expires, it’s possible that Yahoo! might go with a different search index provider—such as Inktomi, which Yahoo! purchased in March of 2003, or AllTheWeb or AltaVista, which Yahoo! acquired later the same year. So it wouldn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to envision Yahoo! delivering some blend of Inktomi/AllTheWeb/AltaVista results sometime in the future, either in place of or in addition to the current Google results.
Do your own comparison. Enter a query into the Yahoo! search box, then go to Google (www.google.com) and enter the same query. The results should look familiar.
The contract that Yahoo! has with Google is not open-ended, which means that when the current contract expires, it’s possible that Yahoo! might go with a different search index provider—such as Inktomi, which Yahoo! purchased in March of 2003, or AllTheWeb or AltaVista, which Yahoo! acquired later the same year. So it wouldn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to envision Yahoo! delivering some blend of Inktomi/AllTheWeb/AltaVista results sometime in the future, either in place of or in addition to the current Google results.
Do your own comparison. Enter a query into the Yahoo! search box, then go to Google (www.google.com) and enter the same query. The results should look familiar.
Since searching with Yahoo! is the same as searching with Google, you can use Google’s advanced search operators when you conduct a Yahoo! Web Search. These operators help you fine-tune your search by including or excluding specific words, searching for exact phrases, and narrowing your search to certain sites or domains. There’s no point in repeating those operators twice in the same book, so turn to Chapter 6 to learn more—then utilize those advanced search operators the next time you construct a query on Yahoo!.
In addition to using Google’s advanced search operators, Yahoo! also has a few special keywords of its own you can use in the home page search box. Read Secrets #8 through #12 to learn more.
from 501 website secrets, Michael Miller
from 501 website secrets, Michael Miller
