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Version November 2006
    

Why Yahoo
Useful findings
Nemo's essay (September 2005)




YAHOO
Advanced
- for exclusion (but NOT if using booleans, " " for exact match
( ) for nesting, AND NOT for boolean exclusion
no case sensitivity whatsoever
Now with the VERY important NEAR operator (november 2006)
 √  
Da biggest index?

YAHOO [Once Yahoo had only 677 results viewable, now the SERPs stop at 1000]
For info on Yahoo's (Inktomi's) rich syntax, see Nemo's essay (September 2005)

Yahoo recognized the tragical mistake of going commercial and went 'back to basic' in late 2002 (better late than never) it seems to be gaining momentum as part of the inktomi factories :-)
Note that yahoo recently bought the wondrous fast/alltheweb search engine (and promptly killed it :-(
Yahoo is now one of the three "big players" (google, MSN and Yahoo) andand claimed at the beginning of September 2005, to have indexed 19 billion sites (against google's 8 billion). A few weeks later Google claimed 25 billion docs (against Yahoo 20 billion). Since the Web runs around 500 billion docs (and growing) the 'race' is rather pointless :-)
(More on google's ad hoc section)

Advanced Yahoo search


Note that there are some direct addresses for yahoo (see google's UF, point 14), for instance: http://216.109.117.135/search.

There is an interesting "MSN alike" slider tool you should be aware of: Yahoo Mindset, try for instance fravia
Or try "caravaggio": http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/search.php?p=caravaggio.


(You may have to wait some seconds before getting the SERPs)



Why Yahoo
Because it has a big index, this index, however, is mainly due to yahoo's mining of commercial sites, see below.

Because it has a special "creative commons" search option.

Because it has its own quick yahoo javascript.

Because you can nest terms: ((shills AND trolls) AND NOT kooks)

Because it has its own slider à la MSNsearch.

Because it has its own interesting syntax.

Yahoo has its own syntax as well


Hooo, Yahoo too


Of course we are not limited to google. Each search engine has its own quirks, and Yahoo has its own syntax as well: Note the difference between the last two queries.



Useful findings


"My index's bigger than yours, nah, nah, nah, nah"


I have presented these data - that you wont find on the web elsewhere- at my last Helsinki conference. They demonstrate that -for the main search engines- index size is only loosely (and peraphs inversely :-) related to the quality of results returned
In August 2005 Yahoo announced suddenly to have indexed 19 Billion (milliards) documents. Clearly an attempt to dwarf Google's famous "8 Billion" (Milliards) sites.
Alas! No wonder that the results of (almost) any test search you may launch keep to be in Google's favor: as the following data prove, the biggest increase in Yahoo's results seems to have been in "frills" domains.
For instance Yahoo now indexes 9.560.000.000 "com" domain documents, versus the 1.690.000.000 indexed by google. As you can see, the most striking differences, when regarding domains, are to be found on crap & frill domains like "com", "info", "net" & "biz".
We can clearly see that the differences are less important for more content-rich domains like "edu", "org", "gov", "mil" and "int".
Here some graphs:

Note the sad preponderance of ".com" domains among those indexed:

god image

Note the absolute preponderance of those very ".com" domains in Yahoo:

yado image

Would anyone in his right mind prefer a search engine that prefers "biz", "info", "net" and "com" domains?

diyago image


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