I use Google, however, that is because it is my Firefox homepage. I guess if Yahoo was set as my Homepage and it was quicker and minimalistic like Google I would use it more. However, the results are usually similar, so I don't think it matters which one you chose to use.

Well, I prefer Google for several reasons:

(one) The Google homepage loads a lot faster than the Yahoo one does. This is instrumental if I'm doing a quick search--I'm not interested in spending a lot of time staring at the webpage's news (or even ad)-filled content. Google gets to its point faster than Yahoo, so I'd much rather stick to a service provider that doesn't attempt to distract me.

(two) Google usually returns better results than Yahoo. Granted, a lot of general searches do return the same results, but usually, hidden towards the end of the first or beginning of the second page, there's some gem that Google included that Yahoo did not. Of course, what maybe be useful to one user may be detrimental to the next.

Yahoo's homepage, for instance, offers search suggestions the same way that experiment in Google Labs did. Evidently the Labs experiment never made it onto the Google homepage, which I find to be a good thing. It's not so much that the suggestion feature was bad, on the contrary, it is quite nice. However, putting it on the homepage makes search for a single word (or even a part of a word if you are a slow typer) an annoying task as I wait for the search suggestions to load. I know this was all done with good intentions, but slowing down its own homepage when one of the most valued things about search is speed (or getting to the result!) is a bad idea. I want to get to my result quickly, not sit around and wait for things to load.

However, once you start searching, I believe Yahoo's drop down menu of search terms related to the original search query is quite useful. My only balk is at the drop down menu--there really is no need to use excessive amounts of javascript (especially since the drop down was animated quite smoothly too...) as that just slows things down. Why can't Yahoo just plug the newly suggested search terms at the bottom of the search results page so that it is neither disruptive nor non-existent? I know Baidu does this and believe it works quite effectively without hogging the user's computer's resources.

(three) This has nothing to do with search and everything to do with flexibility. Google's search can be used as a calculator. For instance:

http://www.google.com/search?q=2ln(3)%2Bsin(pi) - 2ln(3)+sin(pi) = 2.19722458
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=5...amp;btnG=Search - 5ft/s to km/hr - 5 (ft / s) = 5.4864 km / hr

Incidentally, I tend to use Google's search box for calculations as well (usually simple arithmetic, but I've also found the units conversion to be especially useful when I'm working on physics. Yahoo, unfortunately, does not integrate this ability with its search. Though this doesn't technically degrade the quality of Yahoo's search, it does mean that I won't pick it as my search engine of choice for my browser since it isn't quite as flexible as Google. After all, why wouldn't I want that search box in the browser to be usable as both a calculator and a search engine?

google is better overall but yahoo has a good image search google does get better results though and google puts them i relevance order yahoo don't seem to

Well, people use google WAY more than yahoo does, so if u want ur site to be on google search and b crawled upon, it will take weeks and weeks to get crawled, yahoo however, is less used by users so getting ur site to b crawled in yahoo search is way quicker, so if u want to just search, ill choose google, but if u want ur site to be in results, ill choose yahoo...

This post has been edited by DriftDevil: Jun 1 2008, 04:56 AM

Although Yahoo! was started before Google,
Google is the best search engine, no doubt about it.

Google brings me better results. Yay Google!