Introduced in 1994, Yahoo was the first web directory and remains arguably the most popular search site on the Internet today (websearch.about.com). Much of its popularity is due to the careful construction and maintenance of its web catalog. Yahoo also boasts an easy to read and intuitive user interface design. In addition to the ease of interface, Yahoo is user friendly because it is easy to customize. The option of “my Yahoo” allows the user to simply customize a their page to deliver only the news they want.
A feature important to Yahoo’s continued success is it’s indexing strategy. Whereas many search engines use “spider” software that crawls through the web and indexes sites, Yahoo uses human generated site descriptions to index its web pages. This much-imitated human indexing helps Yahoo to return relevant search results by avoiding the invisible, and often misleading, metatags that webmasters often attach to their site to attract hits (www.pcworld.com). Yahoo is ideal for general searches. Unlike Google and hotbot?, Yahoo takes the user to entire sites, rather than to specific pages. This can be very helpful for a user that is looking for a specific page but is not sure exactly what they are looking for within it (www.pcworld.com). Another helpful tool that differs from Google (and hotbot?), that Yahoo allows users to search by categories or by web sites. This helps to narrow down search results to make them more manageable (www.pcworld.com).
For my personal evaluation of Google, Yahoo, and Hotbot, I chose to search a query that I will actually use: the Nokia 8260 cell phone. This search is bias in its scope and subject; however, it is an effective search to highlight some real differences among specific search engines. I started off with two-part search to 1.) Find the official site for the Nokia 8260 cell phone and 2.) Find a site offering the purchase of an 8260 over the Internet.
With the key term “Nokia 8260”, Googles first result took me straight to an AT&T webpage devoted exclusively to showcasing the phone with all its specifications and features clearly listed. While this page was helpful I would have preferred to be taken more directly to the official 8260 site posted by Nokia. Although I only checked the first 30 of the 46,000 results, while they were all relevant to the Nokia 8260, from phone reviews to phone sales, the official site was not listed. 46,000 results is quite an overwhelming number of results, and it is not logical to think that anyone would actually sort through all of them, however I found even sorting through the first 30 to be tedious, time consuming, and overall not as helpful as expected in looking to buy a 8260. This search would have been much more useful to a user just trying to find information on the 8260, and not actually trying to find a particular site. Naturally in such a consumer driven medium as the Internet in such a consumer driven society as America, a good portion of the top results were links to purchase an 8260.
The same search on Yahoo yielded varied results. As Yahoo returns results in a series of different categories, not just a list of links like Google, it first gave me an “Inside Yahoo!” listing for Nokia 8260 phones on auction, next it returned sponsor matches (search results that are paid for by businesses or organizations) for “exclusive offers” and “nokia accessories” available on-line, and finally Yahoo returned 4 webpage matches including one article, “Will Nokia 8260 be the number one phone in America”, two featuring phone reviews, and finally the official site of the Nokia 8260. I personally found these results, while not a plentiful as Googles, to be much easier to sort through because of their organization into categories, much more relevant, and in general very successful in finding the official Nokia site, and helpful to me as a consumer looking to buy an 8260.
I carried out my final search on Hotbot. The first results returned were the same sponsored search listings as came back from Yahoo, “AT&T exclusive online offers” and “nokia 8260 accessories” available online. Listed next were some “search partner” links, one for jobs with Nokia in your area, another for nokia phones up for bid on ebay, and a final option for nokia cables available for sale on-line. The link to e-bay may be very useful for my purchase of a phone, but the other two seemed very random and unhelpful for my search. The web results included 8,200 results from across the web. Out of the first 31 of these I found relevant results that enabled me to purchase a Nokia 8260, yet no link to the official Nokia website. An interesting feature is that HotBot offers to run the search again with Lycos.