Search Engine Marketing
A Glimpse at Yahoo's Search Engine
March 2005
Yahoo, owner of the web’s oldest “directory,” has made quite a few changes in its search engine product over the past few years, giving itself an extreme makeover to better compete with search rivals Google and MSN.
Established in 1994, Yahoo had human editors manually organize websites into categories. In 2002, Yahoo added crawler-based listings to categorize its main results. These listings were provided by Google until 2004 when Yahoo began using its own search technology, with its own index and ranking algorithm.
This radical move was foreseen when Yahoo purchased Inktomi in 2003. Many thought Yahoo would begin using Inktomi’s search index, but surprisingly Yahoo waited, then launched its own index and halted operation of the Inktomi search engine. However, their image search is still powered by Google, and their news search is still a combination of Yahoo's own editorial and technological resources.
According to Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president of search and marketplace, the reason for Yahoo’s delayed move from Google to its own index was to ensure that Yahoo’s users would encounter a favorable and improved experience after it was all said and done. "It was absolutely essential to us that we had a roadmap in place that not only let us sustain our quality, but build on it."
Users who prefer or wish to access the Yahoo Directory can still do so through two ways. First, when you run a keyword search through Yahoo, you’ll see “category” links underneath certain listed sites results. When clicked on, these will take you to a list of websites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor.
Secondly, users can run a search through just the human-compiled Yahoo Directory, and not the crawler-based listings. This can be done by searching directly from the Yahoo Directory home page at dir.yahoo.com, instead of the regular Yahoo.com home page. There you can find both directory category links ("Related Directory Categories") and "Directory Results," which are the top website matches drawn from all categories of the Yahoo Directory.
Currently, commercial websites must pay a $299 annual fee and pass through editor approval before being included in Yahoo Directory’s commercial listings. Inclusion in the Directory is free for non-commercial content. Inclusion in the crawler-based results is free, though Yahoo offers a content acquisition program (CAP) for websites that are willing to pay for faster inclusion or more frequent visits by the Yahoo spiders. However, Yahoo states this pay-for-inclusion does not guarantee a higher ranking.
To compete with Google, Yahoo also sells paid placement advertising links that appear on its own site and which are distributed to others. These are sold through Overture, whom Yahoo acquired in 2003. In March 2005, Yahoo renamed the Overture service Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions.
Yahoo’s search index is capable of capturing up to 500K of the full text of web pages compared to the 101K limit that Google can index. The range of file types that are currently being indexed include HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office documents. But how does Yahoo’s index compare to Google’s index number-wise? Well, Yahoo continues to remain quiet about that while Google continues to be quite vocal about its ever-expanding index number, which, by the way, as of March 2005 stands at 8,058,044,651. However, even with Yahoo’s discreetness over this issue, many believe that both indexes are pretty comparable to each other.
"We're very confident in the quality and size of our index, and we think the results speak for themselves," says Weiner.
With its eyes on the prize, Yahoo continues to develop and push new improvements to its web search results and beyond. Look for Yahoo to begin focusing on and fine-tuning its personalization and vertical search capabilities in 2005.
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