Yahoo vs. Google
In the past few weeks I’ve switched to yahoo.com as my primary search engine.
Do I have mental damage? A job at Yahoo that requires I eat the dog food? A pathological hatred of popularity?
No, no, and yes, but that’s not the reason.
The fact of the matter is that for my every day life, Yahoo has become the better search engine. Three quick examples as to why:
– On Thanksgiving, I wanted a quick refresher on how to carve a bird. The main page of yahoo.com had a section on everything I needed to know about carving a turkey straight from Martha Stewart herself. I didn’t even bother checking out google.com, maybe I could have found something after poking around a bit.
– The other day I saw an episode of Biker Build-Off[1] featuring Zero Engineering. I typed “Zero Engineering” (no quotes) into google.com and got a couple of hits with online magazine articles, but nothing pointed to Zero Engineering’s web site in the first few pages of results. Using the same search at yahoo.com returned http://www.zerochop.com — Zero Engineering’s website — as the first result.
– Last night we wanted to go see a movie. Again, yahoo.com wins — start with yahoo.com, click on “Movies”, enter my zip code, and within minutes I had the show-times for local showings of “A Very Long Engagement”.
On the other hand, maybe I just have good library research skills and know where to start looking for things. Google’s a bit too much like every index of every book in the library concatenated together while Yahoo has become the card catalog and the nice old librarian behind the counter, all in one. (I know, I know, “What’s a card catalog?”. Damn kids today and your fancy library terminals.)
1. An excellent series about top notch fabricators designing and building bikes designed to be ridden and entered in show competitions. Definitely not a soap-opera like “American Chopper” or “American Hot Rod”, if you want to learn something about metal fabrication and paint, the various “Biker Build-Off” series are a must-see. “A Car is Reborn” and “A Bike is Born” should also be on your TiVo DVR’s Season Pass list, but I’ll write more about those later.
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