Google me

Well, well, who would have thought it?

Just as Google details its plans to float on the stock market, perhaps Yahoo!’s new search algorithm might be the first to truly take a swipe at Google's predominance.

Much as I find this surprising to say, Google’s stranglehold on searches may just be loosening a tad. An extensive bout of researching recently found the author exhausting Google and having more luck with Yahoo! instead.

What was even more surprising was that the top results, which you might have reasonably expected to be fairly similar, weren’t. And for the author what was edging it in favour of Yahoo! were the advanced search results being produced by Google. Despite requesting results from pages only updated in the past three months, Google was consistently pulling up pages that were wildly outwith this time frame. Sometimes the first screen of results contained pages that dated back as far as 1999.

Trying out the same search terms at Yahoo! brought far better quality results on this occasion. It will be interesting to compare the two over a longer period to see which performs more consistently on quality.

Watch this space.