Yahoo!
By incorporating Google's Web search engine and the Open Directory Project, Yahoo! handles general searches with aplomb, but complex and natural-language queries are best taken elsewhere. Few tools are provided for refining searches. Although still a solid offering, Yahoo! has failed to keep pace with some of its competitors.
Searches can include Boolean but not wildcard operators, and you're able to limit the search in terms of how recently sites were created. When you input a query, Yahoo! provides six types of results: Inside Yahoo! pages, or original content on Yahoo! itself; subcategories from the Yahoo! directory; particular sites from the directory; sites drawn from the Web at large; matches from Yahoo! News; and matches from Yahoo! Events.
Results from the Yahoo! directory are poor unless your query is relatively simple. The query best price for Palm Pilot yielded plenty of Palm hits, but none of the links on the first page mentioned prices. Results from the rest of the Web, provided by Google, are often better, however. And though rare, Inside Yahoo! matches are useful in most cases, especially for current subjects. On our search for the upcoming film Quills, Inside Yahoo! provided a cast list, a synopsis, photographs, and a link to the official site
Direct Link: Yahoo!
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