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Yahoo! Re-defines Search Engine Optimisation!
Yahoo new assistant is a tad odd
by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk
Last updated: 9 Oct 2007
Its not just Microsoft who have done up their search engine, Yahoo have made theirs more functional and interesting. The main change to the previous Search Engine is the revolutionary Google Suggest busting search assistant. Unlike Google's version this suggests not only commonly used searches but also related terms e.g. searching for 'fish' may come up 'fishing gear' or 'fish knives' and related companies to that subject it also has a bad-language limitation and will not relate to swear words. The algorithm can be quite accurate to what your searching for but sometimes gets it quite wrong, I searched the word 'cat' and I got Argos catalogue but usually its results are related.
There are a couple things slightly 'odd' about this new assistant, first off www.yahoo.com revels in the wonder of this new tool but us poor unfortunates in the .co.uk. don't get the assistant but we do get to change the colour of the page to a charming pukey shade of twee AND change the layout from normal to 'narrow'! The excitement in the office was unbelievable... The next odd and wholly pointless thing is that on www.yahoo.com you get an option to search for U.K. only results, which in my opinion completely defeats the purpose of yahoo.co.uk. But as the name of this article implies, Yahoo, or rather Yahoo's assistant has re-defined search engine optimisation, if you search 'search engine' no suggestions turn up at all, but if you search 'searchengine' you get a whole list of possible phrases including 'searchengine optimisation' I'm not quite sure why Yahoo has decided upon this new spelling of these words except the possibility that the person(s) who wrote the algorithm was illiterate.
The other improvements include joining up with Google and Microsoft's 'blending' technique i.e showing videos and images alongside the normal results. Despite this not much has really changed for the better, I can't say it thrills the user.
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