Yahoo vs. Google

Who will win the battle for the "top" search engine?

According to a recent WSJ article, Yahoo recently revamped its search engine to attempt to gain some ground on Google, the leader in this area. Nielsen Co. August figures show that Google search use in the United States is up by one-third from a year ago and has 53.6 percent of all U.S. searches; Yahoo has a 20 percent share. But Yahoo had some tricks up its sleeve in the latest upgrade: it changed its model to use universal search. (Google was the first and others will follow).

The article says:
"At Yahoo, universal search means Yahoo's search-engine results now include relevant photos from its Flickr photo-sharing site, events posted at its Upcoming.org and material from Yahoo Answers, where questions are posted for anyone to answer, among other new Yahoo-generated sources."

A quick test of Yahoo's search engine reveals a much-improved tool... but I'll have to give it some time to see how the results really compare. (I'm a propenent of Yahoo e-mail; their recent improvements in this application outweigh Gmail in my opinion.) At first glance, it looks like Yahoo designed their new engine with Google users in mind... it matches the design and results very closely.