Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Comparing Yahoo and Google search results

Yahoo recently announced that they increased their search index to over 20 billion pages and images indexed. Numbers for Google range from around 9 to 11 billion. Somehow Yahoo has surpassed Google out of nowhere, assuming the numbers are actually accurate. Yahoo search has been under the radar in the Google vs. Microsoft search war, but maybe its time to give them another look. There is a neat page (contains Flash) that compares the top 100 results for any search query on both engines. The results for queries such as java double checked locking or ruby on rails show that there is a lot more divergence then you would think, although the top couple results usually match. Competition is good, right?

Do you think more indexed pages is a reason to “give them another look”? Is Google’s strength that it returns thousands of results? No, its strength is that its top 5 results are the best.

Yea I do think thats a good reason - more results does not necessarily mean better results, but it certainly is a big factor. I didn’t say I’m switching to Yahoo as my default search, just that I would be willing to try Yahoo a bit more.

Look like yahoo work very poor of Chinese character… don’t know how it work for other language except English?