Yahoo! offers new search features today

• Apr. 7, 2003

Google competing with….Google???

 

That’s right – in a sense.  Yahoo today rolled out a series of improvements to their search features which they hope will attract users away from Google.

 

Although they still primarily use Google search results, they are also offering other results from their sports, entertainment and other services.  A search for a sports team will not only display the top Google (and of course Overture) results, but also will offer links to the teams home page, team stats, roster, recent game scores, recent news and so forth.

 

The new refined search is Yahoo!s first attempt at taking on search giant Google.  The theory is that if you provide more than just pure search results you will encourage others to use your search service.

 

We are also waiting for Yahoo! to drop google search results.  At some point in time Yahoo! should roll out their recently acquired Inktomi results.  We would also assume they will either drop Google altogether, or merge the two sets of results somehow.  When this will happen, however, only Yahoo! executives can say for sure.  Although if Yahoo! does as they traditionally have, it will just happen – no advance warning.  This is how they handled the switch to Google results when they merged their directory results from their own human edited directory with the crawler based Google results.

 

I guess the only question with Yahoo! now is, since they busy raising capital who will they attempt to purchase next?

 

Rob Sullivan

Searchengineposition.com

Search Engine Positioning

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