The search engine battles are heating up! With Yahoo, MSN and Google all fighting for searching room in your browser, who is your favorite? I thought I would take a little time to look at two new searching features back to back to see who really has the edge in the search engine world.
I have to say this is one of the coolest things to come out of Yahoo in a long time. It bases the search on a phrase or block of text instead of a keyword type search. Y!Q lets you search from any Web site you are reading and offers a unique way to tell the search engine what kind of information you’re interested in. They also offer many different ways of using it. You can download the tool bar to use it, try it in Yahoo! News, embed it on your Web site, or add it to Firefox. To get the most relevant results, you should select a few lines of text from a page then Y!Q will give you a more focused search result. It is definitely worth playing around with. I might even think about adding the embedded results on my own blog here sometime.
I could go a lot deeper into this, but in a nutshell I’ll just say it sucks. Just from the name, “Google Video Search” you would think you’d actually get video results, right? Wrong! Google instead searches transcripts of the shows and gives you four or five screen shots. Whoopty-doo! They will also tell me when a show will be on next. Fortunately though, so does my TV Guide. Google dropped the ball with this one big time. If you want a real video search, go try Yahoo! Video Search. That is the type of service I expected to see.
Google has hit the glass ceiling for now I believe and others are quickly catching up with them. They have proved that not everything they roll out with is a success, and I really doubt that things like Google’s video search will be the “new trend setter” like Gmail and the Google search in itself was.
I know a lot of folks have turned their nose up at Yahoo! Search, but I would say give them another shot! Google still has better basic results, but some of the innovations the Yahoo team is coming up with is blowing Google out of the water for now. Then again with Google getting into the map business – well let’s just say this one is far from over!
