Yahoo Divorces Google!
This just in! The latest, and I do mean very latest, word came through that Yahoo! had officially dumped Google for their primary search results, 3 or 4 months ahead of anticipated. Naturally, I couldn't wait to see, and promptly did a few searches.
I can't speak for listings across the board, but every search I did under Yahoo Web Matches is NOT using Google results any longer. Different rankings, different descriptions. Nor do they match the Yahoo Directory results in most cases.
Yahoo! isn't telling where they are drawing their web matches, but smart money says it's probably Inktomi. To confirm that, I tried doing a few searches on some of Inktomi's other partners, including MSN. Although there were inconsistencies, I saw enough from MSN, HotBot, and All The Web to convince me that Inktomi just jumped up near the top of the heap in terms of importance. I saw similar results on many of these search engines.
One of the most interesting aspects of this was seeing that MSN search results also seemed to be shifting, although their submission process still goes through LookSmart. It would seem that MSN is quietly making their own change-over, even as Yahoo! did -- behind the scenes and with no fanfare, suddenly, everything is new.
I wonder how long the current status quo will last! We'll keep you posted on anything new we find out (even if that means I start updating this blog 5 times a day!).
Comments