Why do people prefer Google over Yahoo! for searching?

I don't work for Yahoo! or have any tangible stake in the company, however, everyone is always talking about 'Googling' this or that and I don't understand why. Google's homepage is devoid of any information or services that would make me even consider using it as a search engine. When I come to Yahoo's home page, it knows who I am, tells me I have new mail, shows me the news, and provides me with feature stories among other things. Furthermore, Yahoo and Google both take the same amount of time to load. On a personal note, I think Google looks like a novice high schooler designed it, while Yahoo could do without the shameless amount of advertising on its home and My Yahoo pages.





Further confusing me is that Yahoo is the most visited domain on the internet, yet Google controls over 60% of the search engine market. Are people actually using Yahoo for its services and then going to Google to search? I really don't get it...

Why do people prefer Google over Yahoo! for searching?
Well you make some very good points and some inaccurate points. Google's minimalist approach as opposed to Yahoo!'s throw so much information at you that you couldn't possibly digest it all makes many people, including me prefer it. If you like having information on your home page Google offers personalized home pages. Google's home page however does load faster than Yahoo's. I think that Google's minamalist approach is beautiful and very professional looking. Sometimes less is more.





To your last question, yes. People are using yahoo for its serivce and using Google as their search engine. Yahoo has many things like Yahoo! Mail that have a much lager user base than Googles Gmail since Yahoo! Mail has been in existance far longer than Gmail. Yahoo also has this nifty thing called Yahoo answers.





Hope that helps...
Reply:"Googling" as become an everyday term - much like the term Kleenex - Kleenex is the Kimberly-Clark brand of facial tissue - and is just one of several brands of tissue.


Yet...


Do you ask a friend for a facial tissue or a Kleenex?


Do they say sorry we only have generic facial tissue or do they just hand you the box because they know you want a facial tissue and likely don't care about who made it and what brand name it has.





Both are tools.


As to preference, I use both, and others, when doing searches. Most of the results appear on any/all of the searches of course, but sometime the information I need only shows up on one search. Most often that search result was not on Yahoo, and sometimes not even on Goggle...


Just tools... learn to use 3 or 4 types of the tools, ...more work of course but.... better results.
Reply:Google is faster, more complete, easier to query and provides more complete answers.
Reply:I would want you to do a exhasutive qualtitative analysis of the search results of these 2 engines. I personally feel that the probability of giving more accurate results is more in Google than in Yahoo, but by a very small margin. Hence Yahoo can still compete neck-to-neck with the God in the search business.





Another reason is the reputation Google has already earned. We all keep saying this everyday - Google Is God ! It's too difficult to remove this image from people's mind.





And when we are talking about search business, why do you bother about the page design, news and the advertisments? Yahoo is a multi-faceted website unlike Google which is a pure search website. What else you need in the homepage apart from the logo, textbox and the search button !
Reply:Google's look is so much simpler to use, and Yahoo just makes a giant process of out of everything that Google makes a simple search. Futhermore Google has less ads... and so you can almost use Google without the interference of an advert.





Google also offers free personalised pages, where you can add news, gmail, games.... and loads of other things: just click on personalised homepage on the top right.
Reply:because all the search engines are basically crawling the same these days it comes down to feel





there are less advertisments on a google search results page, and it is overall less cluttered. there is more text off the pages you are crawling.





its psychological too, less clutter and easy to use.. the homepage for google is very simple and straightforward, and is a very simple html write up which means it will load on a slow computer
Reply:You can make a personal google page with Gmail, a calender of search history, etc. that is easier and and more intuitive to use than yahoo. Also, google has specific search engines like google earth browser, google code search, google scholar, etc. that yahoo doesn't have. For multimedia, though, altavista is much more complete and has more search options than google and yahoo. Also, dogpile and other websites that use multiple search engines (incl google %26amp; yahoo) are useful for hard-to-find items.
Reply:Hi awrhodes84,


Very good question. :)


I wonder the same think too.


But most people say that Google has more information and it faster.

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