Yahoo! Better than Google?

by on June 7th, 2006

I’ve been doing some research, and Yahoo! is generally the biggest search engine referrer for most Lipped Media blogs (but not Style Spotlight, which does very well with Google, Google Blog Search and other sources).*

Not all stats are available on all blogs, but for Kiss Me, Stace, Yahoo! brings in nearly 20% of all traffic, about equal to any one force (the fashion blog community is one and it is pretty strong). It also brings in 4 times the traffic of MSN and over 10 times that of Google (yes, MSN does just a little better than Google, but that’s not the matter at the moment). Of course, Lipped Media’s SEO might be disliked by Google, but I know the whole family puts in a lot of effort to do things “right” (there is only grey in evil SEO) and more importantly, well. Kiss Me, Stace has a top 10 ranking in preferred keywords (and many others) on Yahoo! Could that be bad? So what does Yahoo! like differently from Google? I then ask, is Yahoo! better? (For the user, nicer, who knows, anything..)

So, I decided to test out Yahoo! a bit. (Yahoo-oo-Me!) Why stay sucked into the Google (virtual) monopoly? I thus installed the Yahoo! Toolbar …

Pros of Toolbar:

1. Has lots of available buttons, like Babelfish, del.icio.us, Flickr, even Yahoo!’s own notepad, calendar and alerts (that can go to ANY e-mail, cell phone or your Yahoo! Messenger)
2. It has necessary things, like search current site, images, and news.
3. It has an anti-spyware button.
4. It has everything also off of a menu bar (optional).
5. It already has a built-in version for Firefox.
6. The version for IE inserts tabbed browsing! (But only if the toolbar’s visible.)
7. It allows for image searching right off a drop down menu, and Firefox’s version of the Google Toolbar only has the option to visit the main Google Images search page.
8. The upgrade for Firefox’s Google Toolbar doesn’t allow for finding search words on the page! That’s very disappointing, as now that’s not possible.
9. Yahoo!’s image search has a very strong, default safe-search.

Cons of Toolbar:

1. It’s too difficult to search things like “current site,” because of the drop down menu. Also, it’s difficult to make new searches in the site. A) if one tries to search again on the Yahoo! page, it searches all the web. If one tries to search again with the toolbar and “current site,” it searches inside Yahoo!! (That last “!” was my own.) Big bad no-no.
2. It does have its own dictionary, but it’s not as easy or good as Google’s Answers.com, or its use of displaying it on the search results.
3. Google’s new version of their toolbar for Firefox is pretty official, with buttons that are addable for Google Image search, Froogle, etc.

Pros and Cons of Search Results:

• They’re different, sometimes more to my liking, sometimes less. That’s all I notice. It’s all valid.

The search result quality is equal, but if you’re addicted to having a toolbar and searching everything, maybe you should stick to the old standbys: Google it, IMDb it, Wikipedia it (not a phrase that I’ve heard yet), etc. The other option is to have them both, but with a button to hide and show each, as things get cluttered.

During my research for the post, Ask.com’s new ad campaign poses a similar question about themselves, but for different reasons. Now, I’ll have to study that search engine!

*This is rapidly changing, as we rise on Google through the end of my research.

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