The New Yahoo! From “To Do” to “Done” in One Search

Yahoo! says they’ve improved their search results, so I thought I’d do a quick check and see how they compare. 4 searches, and no clear winner.

Libarian News was my first query at Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com.
All three put LISNews at #1, right where it should be! Ask and Yahoo lose points because they both point to the New Breed Librarian still (It’s now a spammer site). Out of the 10 results on the Yahoo page, I’d say just 4 gave me back sites I would consider good, Ask just one, maybe 2 if I really stretch it, and Google 5, maybe 6. Overall I’m not all that happy with the sites all three pulled up, but Google wins by a hair.

But life ain’t all about libraries, how do they do with geeky searches? I’ve been having a helluva time with a rather obscure error on the new LISHost server, and spent the past couple days trying to find an answer. “Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered” mod_security was my search, and the results were so-so. Ask returned just 2 results that didn’t even come close. Yahoo says it found 65 pages, most of which seemed on target, while Google returned just 9, most of which were good. While I’m still stuck, I’d call Yahoo the winner this time because I had more to work with.

But what about ME? I tried “Blake Carver” at all three, and couldn’t decide on a winner. Yahoo point to 2 other Blake Carver’s, Google pointed to an image in a gallery that it’s supposed to ignore (robots exclude rule) and Ask pointed to a blank page on Wikio. I’m most happy with the Ask results, but it’s not really a clear winner.

Finally a more common search, toddler costumes. I like Yahoo’s first result, it was a DIY site. Google and Ask both returned similar commercial sites selling costumes. I’ll give Yahoo the edge just for that #1 result.

Yahoo says the goal is to get me from “to do” to “done.” They seemed quite pleased with the “Search Assist” suggestions area, something I don’t see much of a need for, but I can imagine some people might find helpful. They say “One metric we found was a 61% increase in successful task completion when users had Search Assist as part of their search experience.”

Yahoo! says they’ve improved their search results, so I thought I’d do a quick check and see how they compare. 4 searches, and no clear winner.

Libarian News was my first query at Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com.
All three put LISNews at #1, right where it should be! Ask and Yahoo lose points because they both point to the New Breed Librarian still (It’s now a spammer site). Out of the 10 results on the Yahoo page, I’d say just 4 gave me back sites I would consider good, Ask just one, maybe 2 if I really stretch it, and Google 5, maybe 6. Overall I’m not all that happy with the sites all three pulled up, but Google wins by a hair.

But life ain’t all about libraries, how do they do with geeky searches? I’ve been having a helluva time with a rather obscure error on the new LISHost server, and spent the past couple days trying to find an answer. “Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered” mod_security was my search, and the results were so-so. Ask returned just 2 results that didn’t even come close. Yahoo says it found 65 pages, most of which seemed on target, while Google returned just 9, most of which were good. While I’m still stuck, I’d call Yahoo the winner this time because I had more to work with.

But what about ME? I tried “Blake Carver” at all three, and couldn’t decide on a winner. Yahoo point to 2 other Blake Carver’s, Google pointed to an image in a gallery that it’s supposed to ignore (robots exclude rule) and Ask pointed to a blank page on Wikio. I’m most happy with the Ask results, but it’s not really a clear winner.

Finally a more common search, toddler costumes. I like Yahoo’s first result, it was a DIY site. Google and Ask both returned similar commercial sites selling costumes. I’ll give Yahoo the edge just for that #1 result.

Yahoo says the goal is to get me from “to do” to “done.” They seemed quite pleased with the “Search Assist” suggestions area, something I don’t see much of a need for, but I can imagine some people might find helpful. They say “One metric we found was a 61% increase in successful task completion when users had Search Assist as part of their search experience.”