Cross referencing the results and finding similar sites at the top suggests these sites most accurately fit your criteria, while finding sites on one engine and not the other may suggest that these sites are coming from a different angle in relation to the search criteria, or serve a different purpose. Alternatively, there may be a more nefarious reason a site does not appear in each set of results. Comparing both sites may lead you to information that you otherwise may have missed and avoid some sites that you would be better off ignoring.

For example, searching for peanut butter on Microsoft Live, Google and Yahoo! returns a number of different results. Some of these are represented across all three engines and might be worth considering first. Broadly speaking, the remaining results tend to fall into a few different areas that, depending on why you searched for peanut butter, may be of more relevance:

(note that this is just one example and the recommendations may not hold true for other types of searches)

Using multiple search engines can also help to identify and avoid spam sites that have been specifically set up to feature highly in a particular search engine’s results. For example, if a site full of advertising has been engineered to feature highly in Google search results to lure people in to click on ads, the same site may not appear on the other engines.

For most people, their search engine of choice will come down to personal preference: what works best for them, what kinds of sites they prefer to look at, what gives them the information they need the quickest and what other services the site offers. However, by combining the efforts of multiple search engines, we can often get a more complete picture of what is available online that suits our needs and at the same time, check the validity of the results that are returned.

Yahoo! is one of the biggest purchasers on the internet today and has swallowed up a number of other popular websites, making the Yahoo! brand prominent across a range of services. Flickr and Upcoming are both examples of massively popular sites that now fall under the Yahoo! banner, combining login information and other personal details. Similar to other networks, such as Google sites and Microsoft Live, this makes it very convenient to move between sites without having to re-enter information or create even more passwords. The Yahoo! homepage itself quite busy, but offers a lot of information and allows for customisation. The pared-back dedicated search page is a lot cleaner and quicker, for those just wanting to search

Looking at their search function, Yahoo! offers a similar set of features as Google, including Shortcuts that allows the user to quickly find answers, facts and information, even recipes, right from the search site. The results page features sponsored links and advertising very similar to Google and also offers results to your query from news articles and similar searches. The image and video searches work as you would expect them to and the local search gives the opportunity to search for results from a certain area. The Yahoo! Search Assist helper appears when you begin to type in your criteria, offering to complete your search or select local versions of the site. This may appeal to some people and could be useful when figuring out what criteria to search for based on a couple of keywords.

The results from Yahoo! differ from Google’s due to the different algorithms and technology behind the scenes, but both are very effective. I’ll go into more detail about combining search engines soon. I’ve noticed that Yahoo! results tend to favour results that feature the criteria in the site or metadata text, in addition to Yahoo!-owned sites. This can be beneficial when searching for exact terms when compared against Google’s technology that values site that link to and from results in addition to the criteria itself.

Like every search site, Yahoo! will not be for everyone. For every user that likes the extra information and services on offer on the search page, there will be some who are turned off for that very reason. What is clear, though, is that Yahoo! offers a very capable search engine in addition to an attractive suite of sites offering a range of services, such as Mail, Groups, Messenger, Flickr and so on. I believe that the more of these services a user is using, the more valuable and integrated the search engine aspect becomes.

Search engines typically work by crawling over the internet and indexing the webpages they pass. They extract information about the webpage, such as the contents, the topic, where the site links to, who links to the site and any metadata (data about the webpage) that is present. When a user enters criteria to search on, the search engine check this against the index it has created and will return a list of results that match the criteria, usually sorted or ranked by how relevant the results are to the criteria provided. Then, hopefully, the user moves on to the page containing the information they need from the link provided

However, there is more to searching than that. There are many ways to search more efficiently and use searching for different purposes. I’ll be attempting to uncover these on this site and welcome any feedback or suggestions you may have.