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Yahoo! vs Google Search

Enter !mail email-address in the search box and what would be your reaction if you get an email compose window as a result? Try Yahoo!Search to feel it.

I had taken a pledge to try not using Google for any real purpose for one month, including the search that I use too often. I decided to try Yahoo!Search instead of considering any other alternatives.

Yahoo!Search home page is as simple and as plain as Google search home page. Yet I find it very alien. In fact, for the first two days, as soon as I entered into Yahoo!Search page I felt I had landed up in a wrong place. Of course, no wonder, as I am using Google search since my college days.

Yahoo!Search Homepage

Yahoo_SearchHome

While entering keywords I found a greyish blue line appearing below the text box. Too ugly? Bug? --- It is an auto suggestion list without data.

Yahoo!Search Auto-suggestion

Yahoo_Blue_Bar

Auto-suggestion is useful too! I had the DOB of Olympics 2008 participants and I wanted to calculate the age. I thought I need the DATEDIFF function to get the query. To get the syntax, I started typing Mysql DateDiff and I couldn’t believe, the auto suggestion came up with "MySql DateDiff age" as one of the suggestions, exactly the one I was looking for.

Yahoo!Search Auto-suggestion

Yahoo_AutoSuggest1

Another impressive one: I wanted to understand quickmode flag in RSS, to recover the corrupted Thunderbird RSS feeds. I entered RSS quickmode=false. Yahoo!Search made it very comfortable by showing "RSS quickmode=false Thunderbird" under explore concepts.

Yahoo!Search Auto-suggestion:

Yahoo_AutoSuggest

Google

Google_NoAuto

Another interesting thing, when I entered "americaan president", both Yahoo!Search and Google seem to be doing something useful by including 'american president' in the result. However, if I really wanted to search "americaan president", Yahoo!Search is straight forward.

Yahoo!Search Misspelled words

Yahoo_Spelling


Google Misspelled words

Google_Spelling

Though I have anti-virus software installed in my machine, it is a kind of secured feeling to have the search results from the list scanned by the anti-virus software with the latest definitions.

Yahoo!Search SearchScan
Yahoo_Antivirus

Initially I was comparing the results from Yahoo!Search and Google search. Google search results are always more but it doesn't really matter, after all I never think of clicking more than three pages. Picking the right link is as important as the search result itself. Since most of my search is from the domain of my knowledge, I was able to easily pick the proper links.

I won't say Yahoo!Search is better than Google. But for my requirement both are equal. I am planning to use Yahoo!Search for some more time. I feel, it does deserve ;-)

More on Yahoo!Search:
Basics - 1
Basics - 2
Shortcuts

Kovil Pillai P.

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Comments

Subbarao Turlapati said…
I think I should start using Yahoo!Search... looks an ounce better than Google...

Any comparisons on the response time???
September 6, 2008 at 5:15 PM
DreamingAway said…
Well, Google is slightly faster. And the company I work has a dedicated line for Google Search. And obviously that is too fast. But in general the difference is ignorable ;-)
September 9, 2008 at 7:53 PM
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