Yahoo Drops Google - But Not For What You'd Expect

[rmjvol]

News.com Story (http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5160710.html?tag=nefd_top)

Ending over a year of speculation, Yahoo stopped using Google in their search results last night.

Over the past year or so, Yahoo has purchased most of the major spider based search engines, most notably including Inktomi, AltaVista & Fast/AllTheWeb.

The safe money has been betting that Y would replace G with Inktomi but Yahoo announced they have created a new search engine, drawing upon the search brain trust that they have assembled.

While some enhancements will be rolling out over the next few weeks, the big switch has been made. On some searches, you'll see similar results to what you see on Google. But on most searches, you'll see significantly different results. My 1st impression from spot checking about 50 different search terms is pretty favorable.

If you've let Google become your default search engine, give Yahoo a try and let me know if you think the results are high quality or not. Will any of you stop using Google as your default SE?

Ross

[scrumpy]

But have Yahoo changed their policy about accepting paid placements in the search results?

Even if Yahoo did decide to cut off that revenue source (and they do love their shareholders!), Google has served me well for years (I first changed after hearing about them and after getting sick of the lengthening wait times at Altavista).

The discrete ads placed close to the search results on Google are fine with me, just so long as they never stoop as low as many other SE's and include them in the results.

Also, although I have not yet tried Yahoo's 'new' SE, it would have to dazzle me with sheer brilliance to stand a chance of becoming my default SE.

Just my two cents,
Scrumpy :)

[rmjvol]

Originally posted by scrumpy
But have Yahoo changed their policy about accepting paid placements in the search results? Not sure what you're talking about. Up until this switch, the search results were provided by Google (for the past few years). Yahoo wasn't doing anything related to accepting paid placements in the search results.

If you're talking about Inktomi's Pay For Inclusion (PFI) program, that's been on MSN (primarily) and had never been included with the standard Yahoo SERP's. These new results are showing the paid Ink listing for sites but Ink has always said (http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/about_inclusion.html) that PFI doesn't affect the algorithmic ranking of pages:

The URLs submitted by participating Web site owners are subject to the same rigorous analysis and editorial rules as all other URLs in the index. The specific links that are displayed as search results and the order in which they appear are not influenced by any business arrangement between Inktomi and a Web site owner.

The big benefit of PFI is that a page will get spidered more often. It's not a magic bullet for ranking #1 on whatever you want.

Ross