The new and improved Yahoo

February 21, 2004

On February 18th, Yahoo implemented serious changes to its search directory, in an effort to better compete against Google and, to a lesser degree, MSN. Since that day, I’ve carried out extensive testing with Yahoo and, so far, I like the new features implemented on their search property. I think the changes represent some positive improvements, both in the quality of the results and in their relevancy.

Using a spider robot that crawls the whole Web, in a similar fashion that Google does it, we need to change Yahoo’s category from search directory to a real search engine.

If you would like a peek ‘under the hood’, Yahoo has a new crawler known as Yahoo Slurp, similar to the Inktomi Slurp bot many webmasters have been seeing in their logs over the past few months. Yahoo Slurp works very much like GoogleBot (Google’s crawler). Yahoo Slurp is designed to follow every text link found in a website.

Among the positive changes I have noticed in Yahoo:

For sites with direct RSS feeds, a link to the feed URL is now available with this new implementation. If required, you can even add the RSS feed to your My Yahoo page with a click of the mouse.

Like Google, a cached version of each Web page is now available.

AltaVista and All the Web continue to use separate search functionality, using an independent search index. (Note: All the Web and AltaVista are both owned by Yahoo).

Note that a customizable and uncluttered (read no ads) entry point to Yahoo's various search databases has been available for some time at www.search.yahoo.com

Yahoo analysing similar page content >>>

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2004

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