Searching for information on the web is called “googling”. The action specified for the term is literal as when you Google for something you practically launch Google and look for pages providing the necessary results.
Considering search engines and web searching, the Mountain View giant is on its way to monopoly, with only one obstacle on the road: Yahoo! It’s true that it is quite far behind if we take a look at the statistics: out of about 61 billion searches in August this year, 8,549 of them used the Yahoo! search engine while Google was employed in 37,094 billion times. The figures are amazing, as Google seems to have taken more than half of the worldwide market. I am not even going to bring Microsoft’s Live Search into the matter as they know they have big problems with it.
But what is the difference between them? What does Google have and Yahoo doesn’t? From where I stand, there is a thin line between them concerning the returned results. But Google somehow manages to look down on Yahoo all the time. Actually, if I think better, Yahoo! has a slight advantage as it helps the user choose the right search query. With parsing through billions of web pages in split seconds when returning a result, both search engines are fast, no question about it. Tests could not determine which one was faster and that doesn’t even matter, since the differences were between 0.03 and 0.13 seconds. So speed is not relevant in the comparison.
Some may determine which one is the best by comparing the number of returned results. That could be a criterion if you ever bother to view beyond the third or fourth page of results – that is 40 results by default in both engines. I never saw someone go beyond the second or third page except out of curiosity. Indeed, there may be a slight connection to the term in the query, but most of the times it is limited to the term and it may not be what you need. Returned result relevance is the battle ground of search engines on the market. The better returned results you get, the faster you do your job. And even if both return the most relevant results, statistics clearly show the general public’s preference bent towards Google. So, if I will ask you “what will be your choice between the two?”
You may be interested in the following related articles as well.
comment closed