As this article says, Yahoo search is getting to be very good. I’ve personally been using it more and more of late, as I have the Yahoo Toolbar installed. It’s index is fantastic, and can certainly rival Google: looking at this very site, Google has 89% of it indexed, and Yahoo is very close to that at 86%. The lead between the two is always chopping and changing.

But Yahoo simply isn’t as good as Google yet in terms of the actual searching. There have been a number of occasions when I’ve simply given up on a Yahoo search and reverted to Google, because the results are next to useless. In terms of precision of results MSN is surging ahead – and there’s very little point in having a fantastic index if you don’t have a fantastic search method.

One of the things I’ve come to love about Google (and MSN) is the direct answers feature, where I can type in ‘define x’ and just get a definition. If I try the same query on Yahoo, I don’t even get a link to a dictionary, let alone an acutal definition.

Yahoo is okay for some everyday searches, and it will continue to be a player in the Searching Saga. But the one to watch this year, as I’ve consistently predicted, will be MSN, not least because it has a big advertising campaign underway right now, and once people realise it works, then they will be very likely to move across, particularly as Microsoft will be pushing it from all directions.