Yahoo

 Yahoo!, like the Web itself, is too large to be explored entirely link by link. However, with over half a million sites divided into more than 25,000 categories, Yahoo! is both browseable and searchable. Use these two features and you will almost always find something to match your interests.

 Yahoo, search looks for three main things: Yahoo categories, web sites listed in Yahoo!, and web pages indexed by Inktomi. For the first two of these, Yahoo! searches for matches in its database and then ranks the results in order of most relevant to least relevant.

Some of the factors that affect relevancy are:

 The number of search words matched. The more words matched, the higher the rank.

 Exact word matches. These are ranked higher than approximate matches.

 Where in an entry the search words were found. A match in the title of a site is ranked higher than a      match in the comments or the URL.

 The third set of results, a full-text search of the entire Web, is provided by Inktomi, a Yahoo! partner. Inktomi uses what's called a search engine, and it specializes in indexing every single web page it can find. This gives it a lot of raw data. Search engines provide good results with very specific requests, but often poor results with general requests. Chances are, however, that if your search terms didn't match anything in Yahoo!, you are doing a very specific search, and Inktomi's results may be right on the money.

 

© 1999,Tom Des Lauriers
Please send your comments or questions to Tom Des Lauriers