
Is Yahoo a better search engine than Google? - nreece
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/08/18/is-yahoo-a-better-search-engine-than-google/
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mhartl
He's outed me: I began an experiment about four weeks ago, changing my home
page from Google to Yahoo Search for the first time in ten years. The
(admittedly imprecise) verdict? If you swapped in Google branding, and added
an "I'm feeling lucky button" (the only thing I truly miss), I wouldn't notice
the difference. (I'd wager Microsoft Live would yield similar results.)

Google leads now by branding. The gap between the major search engines has
narrowed to indistinguishability.

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prakash
try hakia.com, I have been playing around making haika my default for the last
week or so.

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dhimes
wow--good site

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jyothi
I started searching on Yahoo when I started working with a very passionate
colleague from yahoo. It is truly brilliant that for a lot of long tail
queries yahoo does a great job. If they can crawl as frequently as google then
they are definitely superior in terms of ranking.

Google really got its edge being the default on many browsers. Every time I
use a new box or a new browser installation its a long time (months) before i
change to Y! search.

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ks
I have an old personal home page that I haven't updated in a couple of years.
Yahoo crawls that page almost daily, while it has weeks since the last visit
from Google.

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vaksel
even if it is, very few people will ever cross search between them. i.e. for
me if I can't find something with Google for a specific keyword, I don't go to
yahoo to search for that same keyword, I just modify my existing keyword
string until I find what I'm looking for

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gojomo
And therein lies the rub for competitors: to even get a tryout, they are
competing not with a first search at Google, but against a refined second
search at Google, when the user is already staring at a page of results there.
And even if disastified with that page, they're probably good enough to hint
how the query should be changed.

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13ren
Great insight. Search used to seem such a fragile business, because where's
the sustainable competitive advantage when there're no switching costs? When
better search comes along, everyone switches!

But... unless the competitor is significantly superior, why switch? So Google
just needs to be good enough such that no one is significantly superior in a
way that makes a difference to users. If you're _technically_ better, but it
doesn't really help anyone, it doesn't harm Google.

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ggrot
The evidence presented is hardly strong enough to support the claim hinted at
by the title. Still, a valid question.

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richtaur
I work at Yahoo! and... no, it's not. It's objectively slower and the results
are subjectively not as accurate.

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IsaacSchlueter
The speed and result quality are pretty comparable, actually.

What it lacks is a colorful row of o's.

Once you're past the point of "good enough", search is all about brand
recognition. <http://foohack.com/2008/06/hacking-the-google-favicon/>

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aristus
Testing only on your own searches is not a good measure of overall quality.

A good measure of quality can be found in your own webserver logs. In my
experience with mass-market sites, page-views-per-user from Google traffic is
much higher, indicating that they do a better job of matching user intent with
content. Googlebot tends to be much faster and smarter than Slurp and it's
fairly easy to get good ranking on long-tail stuff in Yahoo.

A caveat: the userbase of Yahoo versus Google is different in character, so
that may account for the difference in behavior. For whatever reason the Yahoo
traffic tends to be celebrity gossip-type stuff and basic noun searches.

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Tichy
I don't think that is a good test, simply because Google has many more users
than Yahoo. Maybe one thing you could see from the server logs is how well the
search keywords matched your site, though.

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davidw
For developers, it's way better, because they've got a much more open API at
this point. I used their search API for langpop.com and am quite happy with
it.

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KirinDave
I won't (and shouldn't) go into specifics, but people in the search engine biz
do a lot of comparison and contrast between search engines. They rate their
own results and their competitor's results, both in a vacuum and in groups.

Yahoo!'s search was not one of the best sets of numbers I've seen. Google
consistently came out on top. Particularly for longer queries, Google is
notoriously good at these by comparison to other keyword search engines.

But it might be that was for our dataset bias. You can get surprising boosts
in relevance for specific datasets by biasing towards them in your index and
ranking algorithms.

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gojomo
I've had the same experience as Searls: frustrated that Google is not
returning a page that I _know_ exists, I then have success with Yahoo.

What perplexes me about Yahoo is that they haven't replicated some relatively
simple things that would make Yahoo a drop-in replacement for Google. Why no
full calculator with unit conversions? Why no 'define:' operator?

They've invested so much in the big hard problem of web-wide search; can't
they throw a few person-months at filling some gaping holes at the periphery?
I'm sure I'm not the only person for whom these gaps disqualify Yahoo from my
default setting.

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misterbwong
I get the feeling that Yahoo! doesn't want to be seen as copying Google. They
have the unenviable task of trying to innovate without looking like a me-too
competitor of a very innovative company.

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gasull
It has happen to me too recently, but most of the time I get almost exactly
the same results.

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ojbyrne
I was up to switch, but immediately ran into a problem - a yahoo image search
for "Beijing architecture glass box" returned 0 results. Google has pages and
pages.

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tokipin
i wonder if this is due to the nature of PageRank. eg when you search for some
words that you intend as direct, Google sends them through PageRank where
they're stretched, weighted, and pulled apart by the Graph of the internet,
whereas Yahoo's algorithms might be rawer (but probably not as raw as they
were in the early days)

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fizx
Try local search and extremely recent content... Google dusts Yahoo!!. Other
than that, they're pretty comparable.

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Readmore
Yes they are! It's good to hear at least one other person who agrees.

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azharcs
Amen to this.

