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.