Why You Should Try Yahoo Search

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If you are a devoted Google Search user when it comes to web search, have you ever wondered what Yahoo Search has to offer that you should know about ? I have, especially now that Microsoft has backed down from a hostile takeover of Yahoo, it seems that the Yahoo search engine will be around for a little longer after all.

Yahoo has been steadily building its Search offerings and I believe that Yahoo does has the potential to offer a superior search engine than Google, because:

1. Yahoo is willing to innovate around its Search offerings whilst Google has an innovation dilemma at the moment.
2. Yahoo has a vast portfolio of successful products that it can leverage from to offer a unique search experience that Google can not. These products include Flickr, Del.lcio.us and  Yahoo Answers.
   

Yahoo recently launched their new Search offerings which they have touted as

“most significant change Yahoo has made to their search business since dropping their Google powered results three years ago”

Once again, Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal has done an excellent job covering the launch story and comment on his thoughts on the new features.

For me, the biggest improvement is the new Yahoo Search Assist feature.

Google has implemented the same keyword suggest feature that is in the new Yahoo Search assist, but Yahoo took the guided search idea further by suggesting concepts that the user might be interested in around the keyword used. Essentially a cluster technology that figures out the main idea contained in the results set and guide the user to the relevant areas. The example above shows a user searching for the keyword “Bass” which could mean many things. Through the Search assist tool bar, Yahoo is suggesting that the concepts I am looking for around “Bass” could be about Bass Guitar, Fishing , or some sort of beer !!

What’s better, as you realign your search around the new concept, the results gets updated dynamics via AJAX without you having to run the query again! All I can say is that it is very well implemented. It is fantastic for searching around a general area that you are not familiar about and I will definitely be coming back in the future.

Apparently Yahoo has also started integrating Flickr images and De.lcio.us bookmark into its results set which I was not able to replicate presumably because they are only running it against selected searches run by users.

Kudos to the Yahoo Search team for keep on innovating and trying to integrate other parts of their portfolio and offering a uniquely different search experience from that offered by Google. This is one non-Google search engine that I will definitely be using and keeping an eye out in the future !