Yahoo Search: Better Than Google
… at least, that’s been my experience for one batch of searches today.
I had to reinstall Firefox on my PC at work, and in the process I lost my favorite Greasemonkey scripts, Google Butler and Book Burro. I hadn’t bookmarked the pages where you could download them, either. So I hit Google to search for them.
Weirdly, Google’s results for my searches were pretty awful. The first search I did was on the terms “butler greasemonkey“, figuring that would narrow the results enough. What Google returned, however, was a bunch of pages talking about the Google Butler script — the link to the actual script itself was way down the page, nearly at the bottom.
Next, I tried searching on “book burro” and got the exact same thing — several pages talking about the script, with the script itself trailing behind. The first result, in fact, was a page from one of my own blogs praising Book Burro!
Huh? I originally fell in love with Google back when it was at google.stanford.edu because of its uncanny ability not just to find a bunch of sorta related pages, but to find exactly the page I was looking for and put it first on the results list. (That’s why that “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is there.) So this struck me as pretty sloppy.
Since Yahoo! has been pushing hard on interesting search tools lately (like the Y!Q search link I’ve got at the bottom of my posts), I thought I’d run the exact same queries through their engine to see what it came back with. In both cases, Yahoo put the home page for the relevant script at #1 in the result list.
See for yourself:
So I never thought I’d see the day, but here it is — for at least some searches, Yahoo’s results are better than Google’s. Ain’t competition grand?
(Full disclosure: Earlier this year I was a beta tester of the Y!Q search service. I found it interesting and useful enough that when the beta ended I chose to keep it around on the blog. For participating in the beta and providing feedback on Y!Q, I was paid the kingly sum of $100 by Yahoo. This payment was not contingent on my continuing use of Y!Q, nor did it require me to praise Y!Q or Yahoo in public or private to receive it. I have no other business interest in either Yahoo or Google.)
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Comments
Michael P.
December 14, 2005
9:56 pm
You too huh? Yep, same exact feels I have.
Yahoo’s results are far surperior. google’s results are just plain aweful. And it’s been this way for a least the past 3 years.
Like you, I liked google when they first came out.
But for me, It’s yahoo all the way.
ugnud
January 20, 2006
11:19 pm
Not suprising at all to me. I always get better results with yahoo. I also think yahoo is a better all around site.
Ian F.
December 31, 2007
1:07 pm
Yeah Yahoo searches are better. I tried “food certain allergies rice” and found Yahoo to return superior results.
Dee
July 5, 2008
6:38 am
damn man yea… I just found out that yahoo is kicking ass by comparing search results to my website.. yahoo indexed my page first, and google didn’t even put it in the first 10 pages… google is getting confused and is unable to link the dots together to find where all these pages are linking to.
I’ve just switched my browser to yahoo search for good… google adwords suck ass anyway..
JohnGalt
July 30, 2008
12:53 pm
Yahoo much better. No doubt about it.
Vibhu Pass
August 5, 2008
1:06 am
Yahoo search is definitely better than Google….. It gave me way better results on people searches
Jerred
August 31, 2008
5:58 am
FINALLY! Someone who sees what I see. Yahoo DOES search better than google. I keep telling people but it seems these days its all about hype and popularity. Yahoo is the winner. Hands down.