Yahoo! Switches Search Engines

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?

I think you mean, "Begun, the search engine war has.".

Re:The search engine war has begun?

That would be nice. Maybe now they can pull up something relevant to what I searched for in the first place.

How can you speak if you haven't got a brain?

Re:The search engine war has begun?

That would be nice. Maybe now they can pull up something relevant to what I searched for in the first place.

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?

Just searched Google [google.com] and Yahoo [yahoo.com] about "yahoo slurp". Guess which one's more accurate? (also, it's plainly obvious that Google can withstand /., but can Yahoo?)

Re:Relevance?

"(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?

the real test?

more evil than satan [yahoo.com]

miserable failure [yahoo.com]

and of course...
litigious bastards [yahoo.com]

seems to work just fine!

Re:The search engine war has begun?

And not Christopher Lee???

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...

Re:Actually...

Google pulls up a little more for the "the"-variant.

So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)

Re:Actually...

Come on... size doesn't matter...

it is all about how you index it.

Re:The search engine war has begun?

Does a Star Wars pun really rate that high of a mod?

Star Wars leads to quotes.. quotes lead to puns...

Puns lead to funny mods.

Much to learn, have you.

is it just me...

or does a webcrawler named "slurp" sound like something more appropriate for booble.com?

I doubt this is a major problem for Google

Yahoo has been talking about dumping Google for a real long time now, so I doubt Google is really surprised. Besides, with the recent update [slashdot.org] to their index that they just made, I have a feeling that Google is not going to succumb just yet.

Re:I doubt this is a major problem for Google

Of course it's not a major problem. I know very few people that still use Yahoo as their first choice in search engines (and I am not talking about computer saavy people either).

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

On a related note, I was at my parents home this weekend. They like to use Yahoo for their searching. No problem, but they were complaining of popups. I decided to install the Google toolbar for them. The thought crossed my mind to install the Yahoo toolbar, since they prefer Yahoo, however, it came down to a matter of trust. When Google says they're not going to resell my information or track my moves, they've given me no reason to disbelieve them. But seeing some of the ads on Yahoo makes me feel they're willing to do anything for an extra click. I appreciate that they're in the business to make money, just as Google is, but Google just makes me feel more comfortable about it.

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

No need to be so warm & fuzzy with Google. That toolbar they distribute, that 'sends information back to google' -- well, SEOs have realized that you can view a web-page that google does not have indexed, with their toolbar installed, and a few minutes later the googlebot will come along.

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

You made a good decision not installing the Yahoo search bar. I haven't bothered to read why exactly, but the Spybot -- Search & Destroy software labels it and/or its components as spyware.

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

Yahoo has far more traffic than Google: Alexa says so [alexa.com].

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

But doesn't google (v.) mean to search with Google (n.)? It's a testament to the vast popularity of Google, not the loss of their trademark. There's a difference here: most kleenex you use isn't Kleenex-brand kleenex, but who would say they're going to google with Yahoo?

Yahoo's Google results were always a mess...

...hidden as they were among the enormous amount of other crap, it was difficult to tell which were the real results. As it was, I found Yahoo search to be so bad as to dilute Google's reputation if anything.

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

My (limited) observation is that Googles dominance is limited to the area they are playing in.

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.

Re:..its own crawler, called "Yahoo! Slurp"..

I take it you haven't been reading at -1...

Result relevance

Google prides itself on having not just the largest number of indexed pages, but more importantly, the relevance of the returned results. In general, I've found them to be ahead of the pack for this, which is one of the reasons I switched to them in the first place (the other being the uncluttered interface). I was quite surprised, then, when a couple of test searches with the new Yahoo engine returned more relevant searches than Google. I'm not going to switch just yet, but it's certainly something I'll be keeping an eye on...

Re:Result relevance

Well, the good news is that Yahoo is trying to innovate, which in turn should push Google even further. For example, Yahoo is now linking directly to RSS feeds if you are using RSS-autodiscovery within your page's HTML. That's pretty cool.

Re:Result relevance

Also I think its a good thing if there are a number of search engines with results on the same order of relevance as google returns but using different algos to get there.

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

She was the stunt double for Gena Lee Nolin and plays the Darak'na in most of the Sheena episodes. See if you can get a photograph of her sans makeup.

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!

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!

Not quite rid of Google

> When will there be anything new from Yahoo!?

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... ;-)

Yahoo has been planning this for ages

It's been live for about 6 months in some parts of the world.

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

CEO: We want a search engine that evokes pride and confidence. Disgruntled Employee: *aside*Let's face it, compared to google it's gonna suck. */aside* How about "Slurp"? CEO: Slurp! I like it!

Wonder if it's Linux boxen?

What hardware are they running it on?

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?

Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP port
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?

Also, what is the basis of a search engine?

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?

To answer one of your questions:

Does anyone know?
I would imagine someone does, yes.

Didn't....

This happen before. I had thought that Yahoo! had been using google up until about a year ago. They dumped them, and started using their own search. I stopped using the Yahoo search becuase the results were not as good as google's, or so it seemed. Am I completely off here? I couldn't find anything about it on the web.

Re:Didn't....

I couldn't find anything about it on the web

Did you try googling [google.co.uk] for it?

I love Google.

I love Google (the new deskbar rocks) and I also frequent Yahoo! for chess and Fantasy Hockey. What I want to know is this: why is being the number search engine worth fighting over? Other than selling services to corporations and little text ads, how does Google make money? Or more importantly, why does Google need to be the number one search engine to make money? This reminds me of the browser wars. The logic was, you owned the browser, you owned the 'net. And although you could make the case that IE won the war, how does IE being the most popular browser translate into money for MS when they give it away for free? I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now.

Re:I love Google.

Google to a lot of people is the ONLY search engine. Its become a brand much more so than IE, or even (arguably) Windows. The phrases 'to google' and 'googling' are fast becoming part of the english language on both sides of the pond. In order to google to keep getting the fat ad subs they live off it still needs to be number one. With IE it was just to eliminate the competition.

Re:I love Google.

>Other than selling services to corporations and little text >ads, how does Google make money?

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.

Flawed idea

From the CNET article: [com.com]
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

I want an objective search engine, not one where companies can pay for placement

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!?

Most people use Google as their default search tool, even a lot of those unsophisticated Windows users whose IE still comes up with the default MSN page. It's entered the vernacular as a common verb.

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!?

Yahoo's objective isn't to improve their service, their objective is to improve company revenues. Since Yahoo has owned Inktomi for over a year, it's ridiculous for them to continue to license results from Google.

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

""Paid Inclusion" just means they spider your site every day. It doesn't affect the site ranking."

Are you sure about that? As part of the paid inclusion package [yahoo.com], the publisher will:

"Receive detailed click-through reports with rank, query volume, and keyword capture"

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]:

"Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank)."

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!?

How does Yahoo! improve its service by switching away from Google?

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!?

Thumbs down, Yahoo. Use the best tool for the job.

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!?

Yeah, google is real pure and kicks total ass. Ever notice how many spammy search results redirect to ebay and amazon? Why can't they fix that? Oh wait, notice how many of the adwords displayed on the side are for ebay or amazon?

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!?

Why give Yahoo! thumbs down for using their own technology? If you're an average Slashdot user, shouldn't you be an advocate of choice?

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.

Hey, it seems the search engine war has begun!

Or not.

I mean this is just another stop along the way which has brought us the original Yahoo! directory, Altavista, Inktomi, Hotbot, Metacrawler, MSN Search, ..., Google, etc.

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.

Imagine the cash shelled out to develop their new name - and they come up with Slurp. Some marketing jackass is sitting in his yacht, drinking - no, *slurping* - a pina colada, and thinking to himself, "I can't believe they paid my for that."

search results design

Yahoo has gone so far as to imitate Google's search results design:

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

Yahoo! has owned Inktomi since March of 2003 so the name change is cosmetic issue. As to dropping Google, it was only a matter of time. I'm thinking Yahoo!'s Paid Inclusion Services to their search engine technology is making a tidy profit. The problem? Their search technology still doesn't appear to be as reliable, accurate or quick as Google.