John Hughes
Yahoo has replaced its older web sites/web pages options, which were essentially a choice of Yahoo or Google search results, with a new system.
A searchers choice is now "web matches", the default search, returning a mix of Yahoo and Google results, or "directory" returning Yahoo-listed sites only.
The thinking is that the default search results in Yahoo now offer a more comprehensive set of search results for users, with the quality of human-reviews for the Yahoo listed sites interspersed with the thoroughness of Google's extensive index.
Danny Sullivan, revered US search optimisation veteran writes, "Yahoo says it is using its own search algorithm to sort through its own listings and those from Google to determine which ones to blend into the top results that are presented. This may be so, but that Yahoo algorithm clearly takes its lead from Google. After testing 30 different queries, only 3 of them brought up radically different results between Yahoo and Google."
"One distinction Yahoo has had over Google in the past is that it often presented a completely different view of the web. I'm not saying that Yahoo's results were better or worse because of this -- they were simply unique, and uniqueness is to be valued. Now Yahoo seems to be speaking with Google's voice -- so why not simply listed to Google directly."
"One major reason may be that Yahoo's results clean-up Google's listings. As mentioned, both Google and Yahoo may list the same pages. However, Yahoo will provide the sites it lists with a human-reviewed title and description. Google, in contrast, will automatically generate one based on the content of the web page. That's not always perfect, so Yahoo's listings may be more readable."
"For example, here's how one page within Google was described in a search for "nfl":
scores.nfl.com/scores/
1k - Cached - Similar pages
At Yahoo, the same page was listed in the same position but in this way:
NFL.com: Scoreboard
http://scores.nfl.com / scores / search within this site"
So Yahoo and Google results combined give the best of both worlds. Human written descriptions of sites, along with the assurance that these sites have been reviewed and deemed worth of inclusion in Yahoo, mixed with the thoroughness of Google's relentless web indexing. This means that even for fairly niche searches, a host of useful results should now be served by Yahoo's default search options. Those more generic searches should also yield the most relevant and useful sites as determined by both human and machine.
Maybe Yahoo can have its cake and eat it too.
