As a search engine Web site, Yahoo!
does a good job in text/term search. The quality and precision of the retrieved
information are relatively higher than those of some other search engine Web
sites. Yahoo! users often get many relevant documents of their interests. One
of the reasons might be that Yahoo! uses a human-based information retrieval
system. Human understanding of context and nuance is very helpful to properly
classify a content type in order to achieve a particular aim. Yahoo! provides
a good interface for public services and commercial search. For instance, the
"weather" and "map" are very convenient for us when planning
for a travel; the "shopping" gives us many options of product collections.
However, there are many redundancies on this web page. Lots of
links are presented for several times, such as "shopping", "Yahoo!
Mail", and "map". If the main assignment of this web page is
serving as a search engine, everything should be designed for more effective
and efficient searching.
Google is also a widely used
search engine. Many people treat Google as their favorite search engine website.
We can get more useful information from Google especially in the academic fields.
Personally I always seek help from Google when I have some curricular questions,
such as inforamtion technology. Another feature of Google is it provides image
search, which is distinguished from other search engines. I found it very useful
when I looked for some background images for my personal webpages.
There is no directions or categories on the web page. People
can only access the directory by clicking on the navigation bar. In my point
of view, this directory could be placed on the homepage so that the users would
be able to make a selection directly from the categories when they cannot articulate
what their needs exactly are. In another word, too little information and too
few links are offered for users on the homepage.
Most of the search engines provide a text form for convenient
and direct searching of information. I also explored some other search engine
websites and foun that each search engine has its own preeminence. For example,
Altavista does a better job in commerce and market information; Excite's remarkable
feature in creating a user-friendly interface in terms of different languages;
Google is more flexible than other engines; and Yahoo! has the largest scale
of directory of Internet.
