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The Yahoo search engine
Yahoo
- a look at this search engine
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Yahoo is of course much more than a search engine - it describes itself as a 'global internet service'. In our review we will focus solely on its web search. Yahoo allows a simple search of the web but has manu additional search options including images, news, video, shopping and more. Your search will reveal 'Also try' suggestions, which are related to your search term, and buying guides for many product searches. The search results listings gives cached page options, file sizes and More from this site links, but no date of spidering. Some cached pages did not display correcly in the Firefox browser when we ran this test. The advanced search includes options for exact phrase matching, update date range, specific domains, copyright-free listings, file formats like .pdf, .doc, .ppt, adult filtering, and country specific, as well as a wide range of languages.
1. Commercial product - digital cameras Gives very impressive and relevant results, with reviews, corporation and merchant pages, plus brand buying guides.
2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name We used the search term Sony cybershot. The search results revealed that their system was intelligent enough to know we meant 'sony cyber-shot' with a hyphen - this is the correct name of the camera. The excellent results gave various megapixel options, the Sony home page, review pages, and user questions about the camera range from Yahoo answers.
3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs Reasonably good results here, but with some out of place listings relating to particular band names. They also link to their Yahoo Shopping offerings. The sponsored results dominate the top and right side of the page. Strangely, the results on the right side are deliberately limited in number, so that as you scroll down a large blank white space appears on the right half of the page, which is somehow very annoying. Another block of sponsored results appears at the bottom of the page.
4. Entertainment - Naomi Campbell The official site of the model appears at the top of the listings, followed by other relevant offerings. The page snippets are probably done more successfully than in any other search engine, and are often complete, grammatical sentences - this is rarer than you would think. The model's perfume range dominates the sponsored listings. News items were all related to stories from the last five days. These results are very, very good.
5. Entertainment - games cheats As usual, very few of the sponsored results had anything to do with games cheats, but they are still there, distracting you. The pure results were just what a searcher would need though, with all the top cheats sites available.
6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology This gave the site required at the top of the listings and various other relevant results.
7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel Excellent sponsored and pure results here, including a selection of five star hotels from Yahoo's own travel site.
8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare The sponsored results were mostly good and relevant, except for one from Air France indicating we really wanted to go to Paris. The pure results had two separate listings for orbitz.com, out of ten, which is not acceptable, and kayak.com had a sponsored and a pure result almost side by side.
9. Research - asthma information All the results were fine, and the internal link to Yahoo health was useful too.
10. Research - Iraq maps The ubiquitous eBay ad for collectables appeared again, but the pure results were all on the mark. An internal link to Yahoo's Education section even provided a basic Iraq map without going any further.
11. Searching - Dogpile.com This gave the site needed.
12. Searching - Ask Jeeves This produced the results expected.
Summary: Yahoo search is a pleasure to use, offers top class search options and results listings, and gives access to a treasure trove of additional services in its sections like health, travel, education and shopping. Its easy to see why it has remained so successful from right back in its days as a simple directory to today, when it offers a universe of other services. As a pure search engine user though, it is very easy to get distracted by all the other bits and pieces on offer, and it may not appeal to researchers as a 'serious' tool for that reason. But for commercial or entertainment searches, Yahoo, sorry Yahoo! offers probably the best and most rewarding web experience of all.
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