The Hindu : Yahoo takes on Google in search engine stakes

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 09, 2003

National

National

Yahoo takes on Google in search engine stakes

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore April 8. The world's most popular Internet search engine is in the cross hairs of the competition: In the next few days, Yahoo, the popular web directory portal, is to launch a beefed up new search engine that seems aimed at the current leader, Google.

On Monday, a new button came up in the right hand top corner of the Yahoo page that offers a trial run of its new search facility.

The service that can be accessed directly at http://search.yahoo.com, copies many of the features that made `googling' a part of the vocabulary of Net surfers looking for the shortest route to the information they seek. It has the same bare and clean look and allows users to search the web or narrow the hunt to images or information.

New features include shortcuts: one can limit the search to specific categories by entering "map" or "define" or "news" before the search term. Ironically, Yahoo has been using Google technology to drive its search engine. But after the recent acquisition of a `search specialist' company, Inktomi Corporation, Yahoo apparently feels it can surge ahead in the Net search stakes.

The competition is going to hot up in the coming weeks. "Ask Jeeves", the other search engine (www. ask.com), favoured by many users who like its feature whereby queries can be made in plain English sentences, has also acquired a specialist search technology from Teoma.com and is expected to highlight its own differentiators.

And Microsoft's MSN.com, the third most popular search tool after Google and Yahoo, is also said to be vigorously pursuing some new web search technologies.

It is known to recently expand its creative team for search tools from 70 to 200.

Google, by far the most popular Net search tool has also innovated. Bangalore-born Krishna Bharat was the brain behind Google's fully automated news site ( www.google.com/news) launched last year, which creates a continuously updated Web newspaper, using a special algorithm to scan hundreds of news sources and distill their contents.

Why are all these enterprises so keen on improving what are essentially free tools for Net surfers?

The answer lies in the money that many companies pay to get to the top of the search results — and the thousands of sites which offer paid services.

Search engines are the starting points from where multi billion dollar web commerce applications are driven. But casual surfers are warned: the time may not be too far away when even simple searches for information `graduate' from `free' to `fee'. Meanwhile, let the search engine shakeout begin!

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