Yahoo takes on Google

Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white. Google, it seems, has jumped the shark. It has been overtaken, left standing, and not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.
Google's reputation comes from three things: the quality of its search results, the cutting-edge research and prototypes it produces, and the interfaces it provides for other programs to tap into, known as their application program interface (API). Search, up to a point, is a matter of brawn over brains - throw more money and machines at indexing the web, and you'll get a better result. So it was the last two that really set Google apart.
Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo.
Google's API was also a thing of beauty when it launched. For programmers, the ability to query Google from inside your own programs was immensely useful. And just as Amazon and eBay have done with their APIs, the Google API produced an ecosystem of applications and programming techniques that relied on, and fed, Google's success. It was unique.
But not now. Yahoo's own API is out, and it's better. It has more features, it's more complete, it's technically more elegant, and it's easier to use than Google's alternative. Two-nil to Yahoo.
How about products? Last month's launch of Google Maps was impressive, but not as cool as Yahoo's placing of live traffic conditions on its map this month. Google's webmail product, Gmail, caused a fuss by offering accounts capable of storing a gigabyte of mail, four times that of Yahoo Mail. No problem, said Yahoo last week, Yahoo mail users can have a gigabyte too. Google's purchase of Blogger gave them a place at the blogger's table, but it has done little with it. Yahoo's blogging tool, Yahoo 360, launches this month, allegedly fully integrated with the rest of the content they produce.
Google has an image organising application in Picasa, sure; but Yahoo just bought Flickr, perhaps the smartest and richest online application ever written. Yahoo has a rich site summary (RSS) aggregator, Google does not. Yahoo has a search engine for online movies, Google does not. Yahoo has quietly launched search.yahoo.com/cc, a search engine engineered to find and index Creative Commons material. To do this, Yahoo must be indexing the web for data called RDF - a highly advanced, potentially powerful technology that Google has said it isn't going to touch. Three-nil to Yahoo.
Yahoo isn't just back in the game - it's winning. How weird is that?
 

There's no doubting Google's power and popularity. Yet few of us use the search engine effectively. We offer some tips

Imagine what you want
It may sound obvious, but you have to search Google for the words that will be on the page you want, not for a description of the page or website. For example, if you wanted to find a comparative review of various PDAs, then - using the convention that anything inside square brackets is what you would type into Google - you could search for [comparative review of pdas]. The alternative is to imagine the sort of review you want. It will probably include the words Palm, Pocket PC, iPaq and Clie, so instead, try searching for [review palm pocket pc ipaq clie].

Use quotation marks
If you search for, say, [John Adams], Google will find all the pages with John and all the pages with Adams, even if the words are unconnected. This finds 3.6m hits. However, if you put the words in quotation marks, this tells Google to treat them as one unit. Using ["John Adams"] eliminates 3m hits. It is especially important to use quotes if you are looking for something that includes a "stop word". These are the words Google ignores, because they are too common. They include: a, about, are, at, by, from, I, in, of, how, la, that, the, this, to, will, who, what, where, and when. If you search for the band [the smiths] then Google will ignore "the," the stop word, so it is better to search for ["the smiths"]. However, if your search only contains stop words, Google will search for them, though ["the who"] still works better than [the who].

Use the + sign
Another way to make sure Google includes a particular word in its search is to put a plus sign in front of it.

Use the - sign
The plus sign adds a word to a search so using a minus sign takes one away. This is very useful as a way of eliminating lots of hits you don't want. I frequently search for technical information on stupidly difficult things such as transferring files from a MiniDisc player to a PC, and often get deluged with results from shopping and price comparison sites such as Dealtime, Kelkoo and Bizrate. Many of these can be eliminated by adding -merchant to the search term.

Try a wild card
Some experienced searchers don't like Google because they think it doesn't allow them to exploit hard-won skills in creating Boolean searches using "wild cards" and AND and OR commands (see below). But Google understands more than it often lets on. For example, suppose you want to find a number of quiz sites that decide what kind of flower, bird, geek or tin-pot dictator you are. You will probably be surprised to hear that searching for ["what * am I"] will do that, with the asterisk acting as a "wild card" for any word. You can also use two or more asterisks together for longer phrases. Searching for ["from * to * pc"] can be useful, and wild cards are not counted in the 10-word search allowance.

Use the site: command
Look at a page of Google results and you should notice that some hits are indented. This is because many sites would produce thousands of hits for a term, but Google shows only two from each site. It indents the second result and adds a link that offers "More results from" that site. For example, search for ["nathan milstein"] then scroll down and click on the link for "more results link for classical.onino.co.uk". This restricts the hits to that site. Now if you look in the search box, you will see that it says site:classical.onino.co.uk. This is the site: command, and you can type it in directly to search any site you like. It helps, of course, if the site has a short name, such as imdb.com [tampopo dvd site:imdb.com]. The neat thing is that you don't have to use a whole site name: you can search or exclude whole domains. For example, you can search for [tampopo dvd site:co.uk] or [tampopo dvd -site:com].

Use the operators
The site: operator is one of a long list that Google understands. These include filetype: (eg doc or pdf), intext: and allintext:, intitle: and allintitle:, inurl: and allinurl:, author: (in Google Groups) and location: (in Google News). What is the rest of the world saying about Beagle 2? Search for [beagle+2 -location:uk] to find out. Google also understands a logical OR, as long as it is in caps. This means you can search for a hotel in Leeds OR Bradford, for example. It is very useful when people, places or things have alternative or variable spellings: [outsourcing bombay OR mumbai]. The OR command can be shortened to a vertical bar (|), as in [outsourcing bombay | mumbai]. Another way of adding alternatives is to use a twidde or tilde character (~). Thus if you search for [~food], Google also searches for cooking, cuisine, nutrition, recipes and restaurants.

The Advanced Search page
Fortunately, you don't have to learn all these special operators to use them. All you have to do is click on Google's Advanced Search link. This brings up a form with drop-down menu choices that lets anyone make complex searches without even thinking about it. This page includes options to search a particular period or pages in a specified language.

Other enhanced searches
Google is always adding new features, and as well as being a search engine, it also works as a dictionary (define:), a glossary , and a very powerful calculator. It can even work
out [the answer to life, the universe and everything]. But Google has also opened up its programming interface (API) so that other people can create applications to search its database of web pages. So far, most of these experiments are not very useful, but you can search recently added pages at GooFresh and compare results for keywords at GoogleFight. For more examples, see www.voelspriet.nl/googletools.htm.

Try a different search engine
Google is wonderful, there's no doubt about that. However, it does not always find the pages you want, so it is just as well to keep some alternatives handy. The main ones include stalwarts Alta Vista and All The Web, plus Vivisimo Vivisimo.com and Teoma. There are also "metasearch" search engines such as Dogpile and Metacrawler, which will send your query to several search engines at once. Google knows you have a choice, and it doesn't hurt to exercise it from time to time.

Compiled by Express Team

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