Yahoo has dumped Google for web searches from its US sites, the California-based company announced on Wednesday. The move is the latest in an increasingly cut-throat race to dominate the search-engine market, which is expected to bring in $2 billion from advertising sales in 2004.
The breakup ends an uneasy alliance between two of the internet’s biggest players. Yahoo, which initially made its name as a search engine, licensed Google’s up-and-coming search technology in June 2000 as it expanded into online sales and communications.
But in the last two years Yahoo spent more than $2 billion to acquire internet companies Overture and Inktomi. Overture provides paid-for links which will bring in revenue.
Yahoo is not disclosing its search algorithm, but in a statement the company says its anti-spam technology will help “filter out irrelevant, redundant, or low-quality URLs and links.” Yahoo will also allow users to add constantly updated headlines and links from certain sites to their personal Yahoo homepages – following a trend to personalise users’ web searches.
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These features will allow “Yahoo to change the game in search”, says Jeff Weiner, a senior vice-president at Yahoo.
Google-like ‘crawler’
But Chris Sherman, an associate editor at the web site Search Engine Watch, says the technology behind both engines is “fundamentally going to be similar”. Yahoo is likely to use a Google-like “crawler” that scans web sites for search terms and then rank the sites based on how many other sites link to them.
“I’m impressed with what I’ve seen of Yahoo,” Sherman told New Scientist. But he says the company could more clearly identify which sites had paid to be included in the index. Yahoo does disclose a financial gain from its searches, though not on an individual basis, but on a link that reads “What’s this?”.
The day before Yahoo’s announcement, Google reported that it had increased the number of web pages it indexed by about a third, to more than 4.28 billion pages.
“We have decided to put even more energy into our improvements and have turned up the notch on innovation a bit,” Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and technology president, told the Associated Press.
Microsoft, which currently uses Yahoo’s search technology, is reported to be testing search technology of its own.
In the coming weeks, Yahoo, which is still using Google searches for images, will transfer searches on its international sites to its own technology.
