Bernhard Seefeld's Blog

Yahoo's new Search Engine

There is a lot to read in the blogosphere about Yahoo's new search engine.

Currently results seem to change too often to seriously compare them, but at the first impression the results look relevant.

As the new search engine is not Inktomi, one wonders what might happen to the results at MSN and other Inktomi customers. Most of them are now Yahoo's competitors and the business of generating search results isn't very lucrative (as opposed of the business of displaying search results), so it is conceivable that we won't see much improvement there. We are back in an industry, where owning search technology is an important success factor (good for us, too :-) ).

Other random observations:

• They seem to treat pages with RSS feeds specially, offering "View as XML" and a "Add to My Yahoo!" links for them.
• Ego-surfing my lastname brings up www.bernhardseefeld.ch, but before that www.b.seefeld.name, which just redirects to the former. Why is this there at all and even ranked higher? I couldn't find any link to the latter, surely no important links.
• Similarly, Phil Ringnalda notes how a single links seam to alter results significantly.
• As for short cuts, smart searches or (as I like to call them) searchlets, Yahoo!'s portal offers a big variety already. Try searching for city names, universities, sports team (American), etc.

Chris Langreiter has a tool to compare Yahoo and Google.