Filed under: Business, Fun, Internet, Web services, Google, Yahoo!
Google vs. Yahoo mashups
Search wars are on, mashup style. Google and Yahoo go head to head and compare mapping and search results in these two beautiful mashups.
Gahooyoogle pits both of the major search engine results, displaying them side by side for comparison. Some of the search results were shocking. For instance, with a search of "Google", I was shocked at some of the differences. For instance, Yahoo directed me to search using Yahoo as the first result, while searching for "Yahoo" in both browsers displayed proper search results in Google. In the image search category, Yahoo displayed no images for the recently unveiled "blackberry pearl 8100", while Google images were overloaded with them.
Sergey Chernyshev built a little tool that puts both Yahoo and Google maps together. They are pretty much similar; however, I feel that Google has cleaner lines. What I like about searching in Google maps is that they have so nicely added major areas such as schools, museums, and local landmarks. Sergey's site nicely displays the actual mapping co-ordinates as well. A nice use of the Yahoo, and Google mapping API's.
Google fan aside and seeing results side by side, I think it's safe to say that Google outweighs Yahoo in both search and map results.
Some screenshots after the jump..
[Via GoogleOperatingSystem]
A search for "Blackberry Pearl 8100" in images showed no results in Yahoo.
Results were pretty comparable. However, when searching for "Google", Yahoo displayed the first result as "Search the web with Yahoo!". Then provided me with another search box.
I like that Googles lines are much crisper, and that they display local venues such as parks, theatres, and schools.
After spending the better part of an hour on 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Qwfwq said 6:54PM on 9-07-2006
IMHO Google is by far the most innovative company, all others usually trail behind. And as for the quality of the services, I find the examples mentioned above really illustrative of the difference between both companies.
One or two episodes aside, Google has been an example of how big corporations don't need to be evil, greedy, dumb behemoths. Now let's hope that it can stay that way.
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Mohit said 9:33PM on 9-07-2006
Completely disagree. While I have no qualms about conceding victory to Google when it comes to search, but Yahoo Maps is waaay better than Google maps.
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shadekh said 11:01PM on 9-07-2006
Its the small things which make google great. Take the "voicemail" feature in google talk. You can send a snippet of audio which can be rather long, to anyone (no need for the recepient having google talk) and all he has to do is click on the "Play" in his mail to play the mail. No attachments, files or downloads and other crap...its as effortless to use as writing an actual mail, especially for the recipient. It helps that web chatting is availiable without a seperate program using gmail.
Or take google scholar, an invaluable resource for anyone engaged in uni projects and the like. I frankly do not know what i would have done without it.
Google maps is great, though its mainly curiosity value in my part of the world, and google search is still rather good...i have not yet found a more satisfactory search.
By contrast, Yahoo has some neat services as well. Its Yahoo photos service (thanks dsquad!) is fantastic, especially with teh firefox extension. Unfortunately, that is all i like about Yahoo...
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Qwfwq said 12:19PM on 9-08-2006
Let me just Mohit's mention of Google Scholar, a truly useful tool for researchers. In terms of science journals, Pubmed's database is much more extensive but Google Scholar allows to search inside the main text which is an invaluable advantage. The same could be said of Google Book Seach.
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ToddZ said 1:17PM on 9-08-2006
Twingine has been doing the Yahoo + Google side-by-side search for a while too.
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Owen said 7:33PM on 9-08-2006
Interesting but I have to disagree - for most real world searches I do I use both. It is well known that each of them actually indexes under half the web pages out there and that there is significant difference in what gets indexed. Google seems to rank blogs higher. But bottom line - I find that Yahoo gets better hits for tough searches higher on the list.
Google clearly does better on images. Despite in general preferring Yahoo, I like Google maps a LOT better.
Despite all the Google love out there, the real answer is that they both have a long long long way to go to get better at searches.
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ebizdude said 9:01PM on 9-08-2006
Some other technical problems with Yahoo! search:
- they don't abide by the noindex attribute in the robots meta tag (as http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/handling-noindex-meta-tags/ pointed out)
- they don't adhere to nofollow in anchor tags (at least in some cases)
- they aren't handling 301 redirects properly (i have a site that was redirected a long time ago and now the rankings have jumped over to the redirecting page)
I'm still a big Yahoo! fan in general but that audio email message thing sounds pretty cool. I like Google maps better.
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