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Review of Yahoo! Search

Last updated Jul. 12, 2023.
by Greg R.

Yahoo! is one of the best known and most popular Internet portals. Originally just a subject directory, it now is a search engine, directory, and portal. To go to the Yahoo! portal and main starting point, use www.yahoo.com. For direct access to the search engine, use search.yahoo.com and for the directory use dir.yahoo.com. This review primarily coves the search engine features. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.

Databases: On a search, a few categories from the directory and Inside Yahoo! content is shown followed by sponsored links (ads), and then the bulk of results labeled as Web Results come from Yahoo!'s own search engine database, introduced in Feb. 2004. It appears to be primarily (but not entirely) based on an Inktomi database.

• Web Pages
• Sponsored Links
• Yahoo! directory
• Images
• Video
• Local (Yellow Pages)
• Products
• News
• Other databases provide much of the information from the portal side of Yahoo!

Strengths:
  * A large, new (as of Feb. 2004) search engine database
  * Includes cached copies of pages
  * Also includes links to the Yahoo! directory
  * Supports full Boolean searching

Weaknesses:
  * Lack of some advanced search features such as truncation
  * Only indexes first 500 KB of a Web page (still more than Google's 101KB)
  * Link searches require the inclusion of the http://
  * Includes some pay for inclusion sites

Default Operation: Multiple search terms are processed as an AND operation by default. So adding more terms should get fewer results.

Boolean Searching: Yahoo! appears to support Boolean operators and nested searching with the operators AND, OR, and NOT. Either AND NOT or NOT can be used. Searching can be nested using parentheses. Operators must be in upper case. Yahoo! can also use - for NOT but only when it is not used along with the Boolean operators. In the Advanced Search, it also has forms for "all of these words," "any of these words," and "none of these words."

Proximity Searching: Phrase searching is available by using "double quotes" around a phrase. 

The following worked until 3/13/05: [While not officially supported by Yahoo!, Tara Calishain has created YNAPS -- Yahoo Non-API Proximity Search which combines the wild card word within a phrase capability (see below) with the OR operator to get up to five word proximity searches.]

Truncation: No truncation is available nor is there any automatic plural searching or word stemming.

The following worked until 3/13/05: [However, using stem: before a term will run an English-language stemming algorithm on that particular word. For example, stem:flood will match on 'flood' as well as 'flooded.' Yahoo! also can search a wildcard word within a phrase. Instead of using an asterisk * within a phrase search to match any word in that position, you have to use a stop word. So, for example, to find "addictive semiconscious vice of biblioscopy" when you are not sure of the second to last word, search "addictive semiconscious a of biblioscopy". Multiple stop words can be used as in "addictive a a of biblioscopy". This is the only way Yahoo! supports a wildcard symbol.] 

Case Sensitivity: Yahoo! has no case sensitive searching. Using either lower or upper or mixed case will result in the same hits.

Field Searching: Yahoo! Search supports several field searches. Use the syntax below, or in the Advanced Search, use the drop down choices for title and URL. The title word search can also be entered in the query box by using the intitle:word syntax. The first six field searches are listed in the documentation, but the others appear to work and come from old Inktomi commands.

Limits: Yahoo! has limits for language, domain, date, file type, country, and adult content limits. The date limit is available on the Advanced Search page. Only three options are available: Past 3 Months, Past 6 Months, or Past Year.

The file type limit is also available on the Advanced Search page. It offers file type limits under the label of File Format for HTML, PDF, Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (.ppt), Word (.doc), RSS/XML  (.xml), and Text Format (.txt). The file type limit can also be used on the command line with the originurlextension: prefix followed by the extension. Using the filetype: prefix, the file type limit can also be used for PostScript (.ps), WordPerfect (.wpd), and probably other file extensions. To use the prefix command, just put the extension immediately after originurlextension: as in differentials originurlextension:ps. Yahoo! will sometimes offer an HTML versions of PDFs and some  other file types.

The language limit is available on the Advanced Search page and include the following 36 as of March 2005.

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish

Multiple languages can be chosen.

A SafeSearch filter tries to exclude adult Web pages. It can also be turned on from the preferences page.

The domain and country limits on the advanced search pages can be expanded to groups by adding the following codes to other search terms:

• region:africa
• region:asia
• region:centralamerica
• region:downunder
• region:europe
• region:mediterranean
• region:mideast
• region:northamerica
• region:southamerica
• region:southeastasia

The Advanced Search page offers a site/domain limit, which can be used to limit results to those from the specified domain.

Stop Words: Some common words are supposedly ignored and can be searched with a + in front, but in practice it seems to make little difference. There are no stop words in phrase searches. Before March 2005, the one exception was in phrase searches where common words such as 'of,' 'the,' 'a,' 'in,' '2,' and 'www' acted only as placeholders and could represent any word.

Sorting: Results are sorted by a relevance algorithm. Pages are also clustered by site. Only one page per site will be displayed. Others are available via the More pages from this site link after the Cached link at the end of the record. If the search finds less than 1,000 results when clustered and if you page forward to the last page, after the last record the following message will appear:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Clicking the "repeat the search" option will bring up more pages, some of which are near or exact duplicates of pages already found while others are pages that were clustered under a site listing. However, clicking on that link will not necessarily retrieve all results that have been clustered under a site. You can also just add &dups=1 to the end of a search results URL. To see all results available, you need to check under each site cluster as well as using the "repeat this search" option.

Display: Yahoo! provides results in seven categories, shown in the graphic reproduced below. The first listed results under Web are from the search engine with the page title, a keyword in context extract (or directory description or meta description), the URL, file size, cache link, and a possibly a More pages from this site link. The second and third items link to their image and video databases. The Yahoo! directory results are available under the Directory heading. The local link goes to local and yellow page results. The News link goes to the Yahoo! News database while the Products tab, introduced Fall 2003, goes to the Yahoo! Shopping search. This breakdown used to use tab images, but that changed sometime between April 2004 and Feb. 2005.

Documentation:
Search Help
Yahoo! Information
Press Releases