Yahoo! Re-launched

Yahoo!'s rolled out a brand new search engine. It has its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results.
It sets in motion a new 3-way race between Google, Yahoo! and MSN for the claim of search engine champion.

Ever since Yahoo's acquisition of Inktomi nearly a year ago, speculation focused on when the company would replace its Google powered search results with results from Inktomi's index.

Yahoo hasn't replaced Google with Inktomi. Instead, the company developed a brand-new search engine.

Yahoo waited until now to switch from Google to be certain users would have the best experience possible after the transition.

The new search engine is for web results only. Image search remains powered by Google. News search is still a combination of Yahoo's own editorial and technological resources.

Results presentation is still very similar to Google. There's a link to the cached copy of each indexed page -- now served from Yahoo, not Google. Just about everything else on search result pages looks the same.

What's Indexed?

The Yahoo Search index captures the full text of Web pages, up to a 500K limit.

Yahoo won't tell us how big its index is, despite Google's recent announcement it has expanded its index to nearly 4.3 billion documents.

What About AltaVista and AlltheWeb?

Last year, before Yahoo acquired Overture, Overture was busy acquiring AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Speculation was Overture would kill off AltaVista's technology and power both search sites with AlltheWeb's index.

To the contrary, both search engines maintain their independent indexes. In July 2003, Yahoo bought Overture.

Both AltaVista and AlltheWeb continue to maintain separate indexes. Yahoo isn't saying publicly whether this will change with the introduction of the new Yahoo Search Technology index.

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