One of the oldest brands on the Internet, and a pioneer of Web searching, Yahoo! have one of the largest human-reviewed directories on-line. Yahoo! redesigned their search result pages recently, introducing a much cleaner look and feel, and organising the results into new tabs, echoing in some ways the results pages of Google. There are significant differences in the way that the US (yahoo.com) and UK (uk.yahoo.com) results are assembled and displayed. For a separate breakdown of Yahoo UK, see the following - Yahoo UK web site

The results are split into several tabs, and each tab has one or more sections. The tabs are :

• Web
• Directory
• News
• Yellow Pages
• Images

Web

Inside Yahoo! - not always present

Links to relevant information contained in one of the many Yahoo web properties. Examples include suggested categories from the directory, stock quotes for listed companies (appears when a ticker code is searched), news results, or their own specialist portals, ie hotels, airline booking, maps.

Sponsored matches - not always present

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) listings supplied by Overture. Unusually, the cost to the advertiser is not displayed. If they are available, the first 4 Overture matches will be displayed in the top sponsored section, and numbers 5 and 6 will display in a "More Sponsor Results" section below the main listings.

Web Results

The main results come from their directory, with some additional ranking information drawn from Google's patented PageRank algorithm. Sites that are included in the Yahoo Directory are marked with a red arrow pointing to a link, indicating the category that the site has its listing in. The involvement of Google is expected to end shortly, as Yahoo have made a series of recent web search property acquisitions, including Inkomi, AltaVista, and FASTs' web search unit. This leaves them as the only genuine competitor to Google in the free, crawled search results market.

Directory

Related Directory Categories

A display of any directory categories that Yahoo has detected as being related to your search

Top 20 Directory Results

The Directory results are powered solely by the Yahoo directory. Further results pages only contain directory results, the "related categories" section disappears

News

A mixture of established news feeds (Associated Press, Reuters), and crawling of other news sites, largely online versions of established offline newspapers, plus the handful of online-only news publications

Yellow Pages

Yahoos' own co-branded offering with Yellow Pages. It draws on the Yellow Pages database, but uses the Yahoo branding to increase user comfort with the service. Some direct advertising is being sold by Yahoo also

Images

Powered by the Google image search, the databases of images appear to be identical, a direct feed from the Google image search database