Five Years of Yahoo! Search, Yahoo Search Blog (Feb 18)
Five years have passed since Yahoo broke with Google to launch its own search engine that it built from its acquisitions of Inktomi, Altavista, and Alltheweb.
And today? The Yahoo Search Blog entry mentions achievements during this time. Here are my comments:
+ Search Assist - resurrected something that Altavista did quite well and then made it viewable only if you knew to click on the small tab and then fiddled with it to make the suggestions less readable / understandable. Grade C+
+ Site Explorer - provides ability to analyze links to a site - the main page, individual pages, the site as a whole - in numbers and the specific links. As well, Yahoo has an excellent backwards link search for finding pages that link to a given url and have certain keywords. Grade A+
+ SearchScan - warn users of dangerous sites - partnered with McAfee - and might have been the first to offer this. Grade A
+ Delicious - improved social bookmarking tool. Firstly, lets remember that Yahoo acquired this at the same time it was developing its own, did not appear to support delicious for the first few years, only recently enhanced - and there are still features users are clammering for such as private networks, and left MyWeb to languish until ditching it last week. Grade: B for delicious; Grade: F for being completely rudderless.
+ SearchMonkey - tool for developers to use to build search applications. There is a Gallery you can browse. You can access this from the Customize button on the search results page too. These apps are intended to enhance search results, but you must be logged into your myYahoo to see them at work. Idea is good, execution isn't always clear, does take time for searchers to figure out and use. Grade: A for effort, B for result.
+ SearchPad - this new tool for searchers to use to compile research on a topic and share is available only to a trial group but it does sound promising. Grade: unknown.
+ Yahoo Widgets - went without notice entirely - these sit on the desktop - pick up news from customized selection in MyYahoo, use calculator, calendar etc - as good as Google's widgets (though there were some problems with Yahoo's news feed last year). How could Yahoo forget about this? Grade: A
However, to this let us add a failing grade (F) for what Yahoo has done to its directory over the past few years.
1. Hid the link to the Directory under the dropdown list for More from the menubar at the top.
2. In Yahoo Canada, the entry page to using the directory does not show the high-level categories - there is absolutely no guidance for the user.
3. In Yahoo, the directory entrance page has the categories down the side, and front and centre are short articles that are to be guides to popular topics - such pressing matters as Conan O'Brien taking over Jay Leno's spot. In the eye of this beholder - junk.
4. Changed the search function for the directory so that it searches the indexed words of the pages rather than only title, description, categorization. This sounds beneficial but isn't - it clutters results with pages that have incidental mention of a word but are not about that topic.
5. Loaded the pages with Sponsor Results that now take up nearly 1/3 of the space.
6. On web search results, stopped showing Category for sites that are in the directory - preventing searchers from using the directory to find other sites that are similar.
On balance, Yahoo Search has some nice features for personalizing the search experience, but it has bungled often, lost focus, and lost market share. If they could do one thing, I would suggest that it be to revamp Search Assist and provide clustered results in an easy-to-see-and-use interface. Bring back some of the "intelligence" that Altavista had. My second wish is that they return Yahoo Directory to former glory - but that's not going to happen.
Posted by Gwen at February 20, 2009 02:53 PM