Yahoo Search

CNET Editors' Rating 7.7/10 Very good Editorial policies >>
Average user rating from 15 users 6.7/10 Good Read user opinions >>

Product Summary

The good: Great multimedia searches; highly customizable; excellent toolbar; desktop searches; top-notch local and people searches.

The bad: Yahoo shortcuts not as extensive as AOL Search SmartBox's.

The bottom line: After a few years of eating Google's dust, Yahoo offers new features that give the reigning search king a run for its money and make it a worthy alternative.

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CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: Ben Patterson
Edited by: Robert Vamosi
Reviewed on: 05/11/2005
Released on: 01/01/1994

The granddaddy of Web searching, Yahoo started to feel a bit passé and bloated when the whippet-thin, lightning-fast Google came on the scene in the late 1990s. But Yahoo has made a comeback in recent months, adding cutting-edge features such as desktop search and powerful multimedia and local searches. While Google has a slight edge when it comes to everyday searches, Yahoo's nipping at its heels, and its video searches, customization options, and top-notch toolbar can't be beat.

If you don't want the clutter of news and weather information, click through to Yahoo Search's own Google-like main page instead.

Yahoo's main portal page is loaded with plenty of content, such as directory links, news headlines, and local weather, with slick, animated ads, and numerous promo areas. The search box sits near the top of the page, with tabs labeled Web, Images, Video, Directory, Local, News, and Products. If you prefer the content-free Google approach to search, click through to Yahoo's spartan search page, which features just the search box and the various category tabs (which you can customize), as well as the latest messages in your Yahoo Mail in-box and a few news headlines (again, you can collapse the mail and news sections if you wish).

On Yahoo Search's results page, try the "More from this site" link to find additional pages on your chosen topic within the same domain.

Yahoo's Web results page boasts a comprehensive set of features, including page title and a short description, more results from a given site, category matches, and links to cached versions of a page. Sponsored links live in a well-marked, shaded box. Yahoo Shortcuts provide links to aggregated news, image, video, and movie info, although this feature is less elaborate than AOL Search's Spotlight or Ask Jeeves's Smart Search boxes. Image searches give you thumbnails, with resolution, file size, and URL info. You can also filter your images by size using the advanced search options. Video searches produce thumbnails for every hit (only AltaVista's multimedia search, which happens to be owned by Yahoo, offers the same capability). Advanced video options let you filter by file type, size, and duration. Local searches on Yahoo are excellent. Once you enter your starting location, you get results sorted by distance from your street address. Other competing local searches, such as MSN Search, remember only your city and state. Yahoo Search also gives you maps, driving directions, user ratings, and the option to send your results to a cell phone via SMS. People searches let you look for phone numbers and e-mail addresses, with additional, for-pay background checks available from Intelius (including criminal, credit, and other public records searches). As for extras, Yahoo has one of the best search toolbars around, which includes a pop-up blocker, customization options, and a built-in antispyware utility. Yahoo also just launched a desktop search utility, which indexes the files and e-mail on your hard drive for instant query results. About the only feature Yahoo doesn't have is the ability to store previous searches. However, like LookSmart's Furl, Yahoo is testing its own utility that saves cached versions of your favorite Web pages. Yahoo's help page provides adequate descriptions of different categories of searches available on the site and offers detailed search examples, including individual search operators (such as intitle:, which limits your search to keywords found only in the title, not in the body text); however, Yahoo's help information is less extensive than Google's.