Explore Yahoo
Results | Search Aids | Advanced | Tips | Other Tools
Yahoo! is best known as a portal. It has a stunning range of content areas for entertainment, learning, and business, as well as a great cache of personal tools.
While Google is the first place searchers go, Yahoo is the second and holds about 15% of market share for search in the United States. Yahoo Search has many good features for Web search and is strong on images, audio, video, and news.
But Yahoo is soon to be transformed as it enters into a deal with Microsoft in 2010. Microsoft’s Bing will provide the index and base for Yahoo’s search. In return, Yahoo will sell premium search advertising services for both companies. Yahoo will also retain some control over the search interface.
Ranking algorithms at the end of 2009 are still Yahoo's but are expected to change to Bing's. Either way, they are different than Google's. Yahoo claims to be using link analysis and draws more from on-page content (such as anchor text), assessments of quality, and listings in its own directory. As a result, Yahoo! will usually yield a signficantly different set of results for any given query.
Yahoo is not as rich as Google in search syntax but it does have many search features. One of the most valuable, and often overlooked, is Search Assist which provides search suggestions and topical groupings at the top of the page. On the left side is the new Search Pad as a place to save and add notes. Yahoo also shows the best sites for getting an answer. (See screenshot below).
See all the parts labelled and explained in this page tour at Yahoo.
Yahoo
Yahoo Canada
Option to search Canada. Has a French language interface.
Yahoo (search.yahoo.com) or search.yahoo.ca
Search Results: For the query web search strategies
Yahoo looks for all words except common ones. Like Google, it will stem words to pick up variants. For example - search, searches, searching. You can turn this off with the plus sign - web +search strategies, or by using quotation marks "web search" strategies.
It lists the best match from a site first and groups the rest under More from this site (request this under Options > Preferences).
It presents packages of information with links to the sub-sections.
Results may include news, images, video. On news, Yahoo might have tabs for News headlines, Photos, Videos, and when available, tweets from Twitter for real time.
Cached: Yahoo saves a copy of pages it indexes but does not show the date of indexing. Search terms are highlighted.
Search Aids
Search Assist will suggest phases as you type your query, and make further suggestions for refinements from a dropdown box. It analyzes the first 20 results to identify dominant concepts which you can then explore.
Yahoo sometimes shows one or two of these suggestions as Also Try - clicking on More brings up the full search assist panel.
Yahoo also shows these suggestions at the bottom of the left panel.
Prominent Sites: Yahoo identifies the major sites that will have information for you. These are listed in the left panel. Click on the link to only get pages from that site.
Search Pad: Search Pad is place for saving what you find, adding notes, and sharing with others. Store the links and copy text and images. Great tool for when you need to collect information on a topic. You must be logged in to your Yahoo account to use it.
Yahoo has a few videos. Start with the
overview.
Search Monkey lets developers enhance how search results for their sites show in Yahoo results. These enhanced citations are available mainly to people who are logged into their account - such as one from Yahoo Travel to provided detailed travel information more quickly, and another for getting photos from Flickr. These come through the Yahoo Search Gallery and can be added to your Yahoo settings from the Customize link.
Languages: Yahoo can search for pages in 40 different languages. Searchers can set the default language through Preferences.
Translate: English to and from French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese; French to and from German; Russian to English - and more. The translate link will show for results that are in a different language than the interface. Translation will usually be understandable but may contain some bizarre errors. It is also available from Babelfish.
Advanced Search
For more control over the search use Yahoo's Advanced Search page. You'll find this under Options.
Search for pages that have gun control canada in the title and also one of law or legislation. Follow the example below.
- Use top boxes for terms.
- Specify the occurrences - where the words should be found.
- 'in the title' will find pages exactly on your topic.
- 'in the url' is good if you know a fragment of the address.
- Domain. Can restrict a search to a site such as the Government of Canada - gc.ca.
- Consider the format. You may want to look for publications in the pdf format.
- If appropriate, limit to a particular country. In this case, might search only Canada.
- Display 30 results or more per page.
Yahoo Tips
Yahoo Tutorial: Spend time with the Yahoo Help page on search to learn more about searching Yahoo and using its many useful services including news, information tools, business resources, online shopping and much else.
Shortcuts: Try your hand at Yahoo's search shortcuts by using code words for quick display of:
- Maps -- map + location --map greece
- Weather -- weather wiarton -- (a town in Ontario)
- Definition -- define motley -- from the American Heritage Dictionary
- Recipes -- apple sauce recipes -- get user-rated recipes from a variety of sources.
- Currency conversion -- convert 100 canadian dollars to euros
- News - will show current news stories and web results -- news "forest fires"
- Airline Flight -- airline + flight number -- air canada 698
- Yellow Pages for the USA - enter postal code and business -- 98115 pizza
- Sports scores -- blue jays scores
- Images -- turkey pictures
- Events - seattle events - only available for US places.
- Movie - eastern promises movie - shortcut to Yahoo Movies with trailers, reviews, and showtimes.
You can make your own shortcuts with custom keywords.
Jump: Jump around the Yahoo properties with. For example, jump into the encyclopedia with encyclopedia!. See Complete list under Everything Yahoo.
More Yahoo Search Tools
Yahoo Image Search and Video Search - see Multimedia Search
Yahoo News Search: news.yahoo.com or news.yahoo.ca
Yahoo News is the most popular Web news aggregator. It draws on about 8,000 sources. News stories are categorized well, easy to view with images or audio and video, and easy to search.
US and Canadian versions will differ in the format and content of the front page and in search results. US version offers search on All News, Yahoo News, Photos, and Audio / Video.
The Advanced News Search helps you limit the search to a date range, source, location, language, or broad topical category.
Audio/Video can be viewed and searched directly at http://news.yahoo.com/video or http://ca.news.yahoo.com/video
Where to Next?
See what Bing can do to help you make decisions.