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Part 4.4
Search Directory/Yahoo!

Yahoo! is a searchable directory. (Information on browsing Yahoo! is here)

You should search Yahoo! when you are looking for a web site and you know its title.
You should search Yahoo! when you are looking for a specific topic.
You should search Yahoo! when you want to see where in Yahoo! a particular web site is listed.

Yahoo! search looks for three main things:

  • Yahoo! categories
  • Web sites listed in Yahoo!
  • Web pages indexed by Inktomi (Yahoo's search engine developer)

For the first two of these, Yahoo! searches for matches in its database and then ranks the results in order of most relevant to least relevant. Some of the factors that affect relevancy are:

  • the number of search words matched. The more words matched, the higher the rank.
  • exact word matches. These are ranked higher than approximate matches.
  • where in an entry the search words were found. A match in the title of a site is ranked higher than a match in the comments or the URL.

Lets try our search for Civil War Generals again, but this time we will use Yahoo's search option.

On the first page of Yahoo! is the search box. I type in some of my keywords and click on the search button.

Here are the results:

As stated above, Yahoo! first returns any Category Matches (1), then Site Matches (2). Site Matches list the hierarchy path above each section. The keywords we used are listed in bold.

At this point I can see that Yahoo! has a category for Civil War Generals, so all I have to do is click on the link and jump right to the section on Civil War Generals.

Sometimes searching is easier, other times browsing reveals more sites than a search.

Yahoo is one of the easiest Search Sites to use, and is one of the oldest. Its Directory structure makes it easy for people to find related sites. Many sites also have copied Yahoo's format and layout, so if you know how to search Yahoo!, you know how to search many other sites as well.

It does take some time for a site to be listed in Yahoo's directory as each site submitted is reviewed by a person before it is assigned a category, so some brand new web sites might not show up on Yahoo! for awhile.

 

Next is the section on Search Indexes, or you can jump to Meta Search Sites.
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On to Part 5 - The Search Index