Search Engines

Topic
Search Engines: Google vs. Yahoo

Group Members

 * Morena  Ianniello
 * Dana  McCallum
 * Artem  Trebukhov

Group Name
Yahoogle!

Argument
The goal of our research project is to find out what makes Google the most popular search engine in the world. In order to do that, we have designed our research based on comparison of Google to another major search engine offered by Yahoo. Even though Google is quite ahead of Yahoo, both have made incredible technological breakthroughs and both are constantly evolving and developing new software and features. So what distinguishes Google from the rest of the search engines and in particular from Yahoo? In our project we would like to discover and later show how Google managed to catch up to and pass Yahoo with such a speed. Currently, Google is prominent in most people’s minds when they think of researching something online, moreover, in 2006 word “google” was added as a verb into Oxford English Dictionary.

This wiki page will walk you through a brief history of both companies, their features, strengths and drawbacks. Later, after comparing Google with Yahoo side-by-side, we will try to define the advantages of Google that led to its current position - number one search engine in the world.

History
Yahoo! Inc. is an American-based public corporation that provides Internet services worldwide. The Yahoo! Inc. headquarters is located in Sunnyvale, California. The company is best known for its web portal, search engine, as well as its directory, mail, and social services. Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang; they had first named the website "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", but was then renamed "Yahoo!", which is actually an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". By the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits; once Filo and Yang realized the potential revenue that could be obtained from this website, Yahoo! was incorporated on March 1, 1995 in Santa Clara, California. On April 5, 1995, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital, raising approximately $3 million. On April 12, 1996, Yahoo! had its first public offering, which raised $33.8 million, by selling 2.6 million of their shares at $13 each.

Acquisitions
Though we are focusing on the search engine aspects of Yahoo! , they have acquired some websites and features that have helped them rise to be a popular search engine. Listed here is an incomplete timeline of some of their more important acquisitions, showing how they’ve been evolving to compete and keep up with Google:


 * March 1st, 1997: Acquired online communications company Four11, and adopted their e-mail service formerly called Rocketmail as their own. It was renamed Yahoo! Mail. Four 11 has since evolved into People Search, finding people by first name, last name, address, e-mail and phone number.


 * June 8th, 1998: Acquired Viaweb, which was renamed Yahoo Store


 * October 12th, 1998: Acquired marketing company called Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc.


 * January 28th, 1999: Acquries Geocities, a networking program that is still running today


 * June 28th, 2000: Acquires eGroups, which manages e-mail lists.


 * December 27th, 2001: Acquires HotJobs, which services both people looking to hire and people seeking employment


 * December 2002: Starts acquisition of Inktomi Web search engine, which used proxy cache (when users request pages from a local server instead of directly from the source)


 * March 25th, 2004: Acquires European shopping search engine called Kelkoo. Kelkoo had a search technology that was known as Shopping Popularity.


 * March 20th, 2005: Acquires photo sharing service Flickr, which replaces Yahoo! Pictures. Flickr is a picture-sharing website, which features tagging and featured pictures under a heading called “Interestingness.” FUN FACT: Yahoo! is working on getting the word “Interestingness” patented.


 * July 25th, 2005: Acquires widget engine Konfabulator, allowing people to customize their homepage


 * August 11th, 2005: Acquires 40% of Alibaba.com, which takes over operation of Yahoo! China


 * February 4th, 2008: Acquires FoxyTunes


 * February 12th, 2008: Acquires Maven Networks, Inc.

General Information

 * On January 13, 2009, Yahoo appointed Carol Bart, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
 * Yahoo! attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008.
 * The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007.
 * It is the second most visited website in the U.S., and in the world.
 * Yahoo! offers both free and fee-based services

Features
Each search engines differs from one another, and Yahoo! has its differences when it comes to searching. Yahoo! is more focused on keyword density and keywords in the URL and title tags than other websites such as Google and MSN. The Yahoo Search index captures the full text of web pages, which has a limit of 500K. Included in this 500K limit of text is a broad range of file types that also appear in the web pages such as HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Office documents. To index websites, Yahoo! uses a software program which has been given the term “Robot Crawlers”. The specific robot crawler that Yahoo! uses in its search engine is called Yahoo! crawler, which is only half as active as Google’s robot crawler. The Yahoo! crawler attempts to understand how often documents change. The more often documents are crawled, the more frequently documents are changes. Although Yahoo! has not specified how big it’s index is, some research has been done to determine Yahoo!’s index size; one Yahoo search result reported more than 2.1 billion documents found, which is only half as large as Google’s index. Yahoo! also has an advanced search option, where one can specify and refine their search so that the results will be more accurate. Although this option is offered by Yahoo!, it is quite difficult to actually find this search option as it is not on the main page of Yahoo! Search. Yahoo also offers three paid inclusion programs, which are Inktomi, Altavista, and AlltheWeb. Although all three have played an important role in assuring a broad range of coverage for the search engine, the new Yahoo Search Index has only included Inktomi’s search submit and index connect as the paid inclusion programs

Some of the other services and search products offered by Yahoo! are:


 * Ask Yahoo! - carefully research answers by searching the Internet for relevant web sites and pages.
 * Yahoo! Desktop Search - free, downloadable search application that enables one to find any of ones files, emails, attachments, instant messages and contacts.
 * Yahoo! Directory - gives one access to what's available on the Web.
 * Yahoo! Finance - access to a wide array of financial resources on Yahoo!
 * Yahoo! Image Search - allows one to search millions of images from across the Web.
 * Yahoo! Local - brings together the best of Yahoo! Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Maps, and Yahoo! Search.
 * Yahoo! Yellow Pages - provides fast general information like the name, phone number, and address of businesses and services.
 * Yahoo! Maps - Street maps and driving directions for US cities.
 * Yahoo! Mobile - one can buy devices, read mobile news and information, configure one's mobile device for alerts, and download content and applications.
 * Yahoo! News - features content from more than a dozen news partners in 13 categories. The front page lists each category of news, and within each category, one will find a breadth of news providers.
 * Yahoo! Shopping - one can browse or search for the items one needs and easily compare prices from different Yahoo! Store merchants selling the same item.

Strengths
Below are outlined some of Yahoo!’s strengths. Despite having to compete with Google’s monstrous and rapidly growing corporation, Yahoo! is still considered to be very successful and very powerful.


 * Brand recognition - Yahoo! has worldwide recognition and a user base of approximately 350 million people. They have brought many exciting products and features to the search engine market.


 * Smart Partnerships - Yahoo! is constantly pairing with other companies to expand their user base and create new opportunities. They’ve paired with Adobe and Verizon to offer co-branded products that will grant you immediate access to Yahoo! and their features and content. Within the mobile phone industry, they’ve joined up with AT&T and T-Mobile International that will offer oneSearch (see Technology/Advances) as a default portal. Also, when they acquired Overture (see Acquisitions), they received a hugely profitable Internet advertising company which has become an important source of income for them.


 * Mobile Product Enhancements and Introductions - Concerning Yahoo!’s mobility options, a large focus is on their mobile widgets, built on their Open Mobile Development Platform. This provides users with one-click access to pages like MTV, MySpace and e-Bay, but also allowing them to build and publish their own apps. They are changing this accordingly with any new mobile phones that are released, making their  applications compatible with  them.


 * Television - Yahoo! is wanting to develop a half-hour newsmagazine in conjunction with Twentieth Television. This newsmagazine would be titled Yahoo Buzz, sharing the name with the website which Yahoo! already maintains. On the website, visitors can read the stories and then vote for those they think should be given the most attention on the web page. The corporation will then use that information to determine the Top 10 news items to be shown on television.


 * More Agile Management Structure - Yahoo!’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, has plans to make their management team more accountable and expedite critical decision making, making Yahoo! “ a lot faster on their feet.”

Drawbacks

 * Like anything, Yahoo! is far from perfect. It’s faced its share of ups and downs, including some legal issues. For starters, with any search made, there is always the risk that it will bring up something completely unrelated to what you were originally searching. This is exactly what happened with Yahoo!  and their image search.  On May 25th, 2006, Yahoo! was informed that their image searches were procuring sexually explicit material, despite the fact that SafeSearch was being used (a program that blocks potentially harmful material). Sadly, it was a teacher with a classroom full of students to whom she was demonstrating a “www” that discovered this. Yahoo! simply replied that they were aware of the possible and are working to resolve it as soon as possible.


 * There was recently an issue with a feature that used to be known as Yahoo! Briefcase, a 30 MB online storage of files up to 5 MB. Yahoo! had given the people using this application notice that it would be shutting down on Tuesday, March 30, 2009. It turns out that March 30th was actually a Monday, not a Tuesday, so when they shut down on Monday, many users were unable to retrieve their files.


 * There was also some controversy surrounding a paid inclusion program that Yahoo! launched in March, 2004. The program allowed for commercial websites who paid a fee to be a guaranteed listing on the Yahoo! search engine. Both website marketers and the public were upset by this. It changed in October, 2006, so that it only crawls the sites of their customers more often and provides them with some statistics concerning the searches that led to their page and additional smart links.


 * Adware and spyware pop-ups annoy internet users everywhere. Users of Yahoo! have complained of excessive pop-ups, which were due to adware that was installed on their computer without their realization. This was installed when the users would accept an online offer to download software that would help with various issues concerning their computers. Several employees that used to work in their sales department leaked that the frequency of the advertising pop-ups was based on the state of Yahoo!’s economic affairs.


 * Yahoo! has not gone without their share of legal matters. There have been continuous issues with China, including two cases of Yahoo! providing information to the Chinese government, leading to arrests. In one case, Shi Tao, a journalist, “provided state secrets to foreign entities” through his Yahoo! Mail account. In the other, Wang Xiaoning had published “controversial material online” in his Yahoo! group concerning political matter, which they reported. This resulted in them being sued twice, once by Xiaoning’s wife and the other by the World Organization for Human Rights.

Other drawbacks:


 * Lack of some advanced search features, such as truncation


 * Link searches require the inclusion of http://

Microsoft
Microsoft and Yahoo! Had discussed potential mergers in 2005, 2006, and 2007, all of which were unsuccessful due to doubts about the success of combining the companies. On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made bid to buy and takeover Yahoo! for US$44.6 billion in cash and stock. Yahoo! was also considering mergers with Google and News Corp around this same time. However, on February 11, 2008, Yahoo! decided to reject Microsoft's offer; they thought that Microsoft it was "substantially undervaluing" Yahoo!'s brand, audience, investments, and growth prospects by only offering them US$44.6 billion.

On February 22, two pension companies from Detroit sued Yahoo! and their board of directors for not fulfilling their duty to shareholders by opposing Microsoft's takeover bid and pursuing "value destructive" third-party deals. In early March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on record expressing is concern about the potential Microsoft-Yahoo! merger; he stated that the merger might hurt the internet by compromising its openness. The value of Microsoft's cash and stock offer declined with Microsoft's stock price, falling to $42.2 billion by April 4.

On April 5, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo!'s board of directors stating that if within three weeks they had not accepted the deal, Microsoft would approach shareholders directly; he hoped to elect a new board and start merger talks, which is known as hostile takeovers. In response to this letter, Yahoo! stated on April 7 that they wanted a better offer for this merger to go through. They also stated that Microsoft’s approach was “aggressive”, which was ruining their relationship and decreasing the chances of a “friendly” merger between the two companies. Later the same day, Yahoo! stated that the original $45 billion offer was not acceptable. On May 3, 2008, Microsoft withdrew their offer. During a meeting between Ballmer and Yang, Microsoft had offered to raise its offer by $5 billion to $33 per share, while Yahoo! demanded $37. Analysts said that Yahoo!'s shares, closing at $28.67 on May 2, were likely to drop below $25 and perhaps as low as $20 on May 5. Some suggest that institutional investors would file lawsuits against Yahoo!'s board of directors for not acting in shareholder interest by refusing Microsoft's offer.

As predicted, Yahoo!'s stock plunged some 13% lower to $23.02 on May 5, 2008 and trimmed about $6 billion off of its market capitalization. On June 12, 2008, Yahoo announced that it had ended all talks with Microsoft about purchasing either part of the business or the entire company. However, talks had taken place the previous weekend (June 8), during which Microsoft told Yahoo that it was no longer interested in a purchasing the entire company at the previous offer of $33/share. Also on June 12, Yahoo announced a non-exclusive search advertising alliance with Google; many executives and senior employees announced their plans to leave the company after this announcement as they had lost confidence in the strategies of Yahoo!’s board of directors.

On July 7, 2008, Microsoft said it would reconsider proposing another bid for Yahoo if the company's nine directors were replaced so that they could negotiate with the new board at the annual meeting scheduled to be held on August 1, 2008. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy fight to replace Yahoo's board as the thought the current board was being irrational regarding the Microsoft merger. On July 21, 2008 Yahoo settled with Carl Icahn; Carl and two allies were appointed to an expanded board.On November 20, 2008, Yahoo's stock (YHOO) dropped to a 52-week low, trading at only $8.94 per share, which is only a quarter of the price of Microsoft’s previous offer of $33 per share. Finally, On November 30, 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo's Search business for $20 billion, but once again, this merger did not go through.

Technology / Advances
Yahoo! has no choice but to be constantly changing and discovering new technologies, making the list of their technological advances long and exhausting! Search Engines is an industry where there is constant demand for something bigger, better and faster. Therefore, only a few of the major advances will be listed below, but know that there are plenty more!

In 2003, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, a company that used distributed network technology, making search way more efficient. Their main competitor was Altavista, who were running their searches on a single machine, making Inktomi highly favored. Inktomi then furthered their technology by developing proxy cache, where “users request pages from local server instead of directly from the source. The local server gets the page, saves it on disk and forwards it to the user.” This is much faster and does not take up Internet bandwidth. Yahoo! seized the opportunity of combining this technology with their global users.

In 2003,  Yahoo! acquired another search engine called AlltheWeb.com. This search engine was similar to Google in technology and size, but never received the popularity that Google attained. Surprisingly, AlltheWeb even had the advantage over Google in several areas including more advanced features, search clustering, a customizable look and feel and a fresher database. A company called Overture bought Allthe Web in February, 2003, and then in October, Yahoo! acquired Overture, taking AlltheWeb and AltaVista with it.

In 2004, Yahoo! took a huge step to independence. Up until March, they had been using Google-based results on their searches. Yahoo! then replaced it with their own search engine technology, implementing the tools they’d received in their recently acquired Inktomi and Overture. This was the end of a convenient search era, but Yahoo! pressed on, hoping this would put them back on top as the world’s primary search engine.

On October 21, 2004, Yahoo! bought Stata Labs, an e-mail search company. This company had developed a software that would allow the user to search for text and attachments within e-mails. This was a purely competitive move on Yahoo!’s part for at the same time, Microsoft and Google were also launching their own versions of this sort of software.

In terms of the new age of cell phone dependence, Yahoo! developed Yahoo! Mobile. Providing the user has the software required on their phone, Yahoo! Mobile provides services that include e-mail and instant messaging. It also offers some features like ring tones, games, and Yahoo! Photos. In March, 2007, Yahoo! launched oneSearch, an Internet search system created for cell phones. This boasted offering complete listings of actual information on web pages, instead of only what was deemed important. All it takes is provision of a zip code or city name for oneSearch to “start delivering local search results.”



History
Google Inc. is a well known American public corporation that can track its roots to 1995, when two students from Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided to make the most efficient search engine on earth. In 1996, the two founders started a search engine that they initially called BackRub, which was later renamed to Google. By 1998, Larry and Sergey had raised over $1 million USD in funding and later that year, the company known as Google was incorporated. In 1999, Google already had over $30 million in funding from private investors, venture firms and Stanford University. In the next several years, founders kept making crucial decisions that would affect Google in the future. In 2001, Eric Schmidt, who is well known in the tech industry, was hired as Google’s CEO. Another important step in Google’s history was its deprivatization. In 2004, the company went public raising 1.6 billion USD. Currently, Google is on the top of the search engine industry and is offering many other competitive web related services(some are unique). Google's headquarters are located in Mountain View, California, and are referred to as the Googleplex.

Acquisitions

 * 2003 -- Acquired Pyra Labs.
 * 2005 -- Purchased Urchin Software and Dodgeball.com.
 * 2006 -- Acquired a five percent stake in AOL for $1 billion. Also purchased video-sharing Web site YouTube for $1.65 billion.
 * 2007 -- Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Google also purchased Postini, GrandCentral Communications, FeedBurner, Panoramio, PeakStream, Zenter, GreenBorder Technologies, Tonic Systems, Marratech, Adscape, and Endoxon.
 * 2008 -- Announced the close of its acquisition of online ad delivery company, Double-Click after the deal won approval from the European Commission.

General Information

 * Google comes from the word “googol”, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros in mathematical terms. It was concluded that this was a fitting name, in reference to the immense amount of information available on the web.
 * Google is available in over 100 different languages. Users even have the option to set the interface in humorous languages such as Pirate and Elmer Fudd.
 * As of 2006, Google has indexed 400 million queries a day, over 25 billion web pages, 1.3 billion images, and over 1 billion Usernet messages.
 * A search query on Google uses about 1 KJ of energy.

Features
There are several reasons why Google is the most used search engine on the web. Its popularity can be attributed in part to all of its features and services, and also to its patented search ranking mechanism (PageRank) and unique searching capabilities. The Google algorithm uses PageRank, for which a patent was granted on Septmeber 4, 2001. PageRank is the unique ranking mechanism upon which the Google search is based. Google analyzes the relationships between websites and the websites get a computed score according to the relevant number of pages linking to them. This method of ranking helps to ensure link equity. This is opposed to the methods that other search engines use such as rank according to word association or the frequency that the search term appears in the webpage. Google's search uses query expansion to gain more practical search results. This includes re-weighting search terms and phrases, offering alternative searches for spelling errors, and stemming. Stemming increases the search quality by including morphological forms of the given search terms. Google WebSearch enables users to search through billions of webpages. A Google search will provide the user with a list of the number of search results. A typical Google search may provide search results including a definition link, recent news articles, a wikipedia page, directory pages, shopping options, blog posts, .gov or .edu documents, as well as PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, simple text files, youtube links, etc. A user may set a default language, the number of search results listed per page, and many other options available in the Advanced Search. These preferences can also be stored for the user. The user may choose to use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" search option with will take them directly to the first search result. Google is proficient at determining the intent of a user's query rather than text matching like many of the other search engines use.

Some of the other services and search products offered by Google are:


 * Google Earth- uses various satellite technology to give a 3D view over the globe in excellent detail. Users can search for and view a location of their interest.
 * Google News- allows a user to search and view news articles that have appeared on thousands of news websites in the past 30 days. Articles are available within minutes of publication.
 * Google Product Search- users can search for the best products and prices available online.
 * Google Video Search- a video search engine with agreements with CBS, NHL, NBA, and many video hosting websites.
 * Google Patent Search- a patent search engine to sort through millions of patents and provide you with relevant pages containing claims, citations, and drawings.
 * Google Maps- a service that provides directions, a local business search, and a display of satellite/street-level imagery.
 * Google Image Search- a way of searching thousands of indexed images on the web.
 * Google SafeSearch- prevents pages with sexual content being listed in search results.
 * Youtube- owned by Google, this popular video sharing website is free.
 * Google Book Search- users can access and search through the full-text of many book collections.
 * Google Scholar- an extension of the basic search option. The use of more specific queries will produce relevant articles, books, theses, abstracts, peer-reviewed papers, and other scholarly literature.
 * Google Base- content owners may submit and share their content on Google websites.
 * Google Finance- a simple interface allows users to search through complex financial information.
 * Google Reader- a service enabling users to subscribe to multiple newsfeeds/view aggregate content on a single interface.
 * Google Custom Search- a customized search with many options tailored to the user's needs. A user may more efficiently harness the power of Google for their individual requirments.
 * Personalized Homepage and Search- a user may personalize their homepage.

Google is not limited to the list above and is constantly introducing new products and services. This contributes to keeping it on the top of the search engine world.

Strengths

 * Dominance Over Web Search Market – Google accounts for over half of the search markets share, and this percentage continues to rise with time. Google’s success is due to a clean interface along with fast and relevant results. Google launched its first-ever browser, named Chrome; Google expects many of these users who download the browser to use the default search engine. Also, Google is the default search engine for browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari, which will increase the percentage of Google users. "If you've never Googled, you probably aren't finding what you want online"(Schein, 2009).
 * Ability to Break Into New, Related Markets Quickly – By introducing new products in beta, improving existing products and responding to the feedback received by users, Google is attracting more and more users and increasing its popularity. Google’s browser Chrome also aids in increasing Google’s popularity; it was found that only after being open for 2 days, Chrome acquired a larger market share than Opera, a ten-year-old browser. Google has also extended past search engines and has added products which have attracted many users. For example, Google introduced Gmail, a Web-based email service in 2004 which offered an enormous amount of storage capacity (1 Gigabyte). Also, Google’s first operating system, Android, is expected to capture 4% of the US smartphone market during Q4 2008.


 * Smart Acquisitions - By acquiring certain companies, Google has expended its capabilities and has become much more appealing to advertisers. Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion USD, which is now the largest and most popular online video repository and service. Also, by acquiring DoubleClick, Google now has base of display advertisers and publishers, along with the capability to provide users with targeted display advertisements for the search and text content-based advertisers. Google as also announced that they are hoping to test displays on some of the pages on the YouTube mobile site; this is due to the DoubleClick mobile technology.


 * Search Technology and Capabilities – When Google first lauched over ten years ago, it had a Web index of about 30 million pages; this index has expanded to billions of pages. The relevance algorithms are continually being refined so that the users are provided with the most accurate search results possible. Reasons that Google is the preferred search engine include being streamlined, instantaneous, easy to use, and having clearly marked sponsored links which are separated from the natural results.


 * Employee Retention - To create more incentive for the employees at Google to remain with the company and achieve the company goals, Google announced in January 2009 that they would offer employees a voluntary, one-for-one stock option exchange. The project was scheduled be begin January 29th, 2009, and end on March 3rd, 2009.

Drawbacks
Although Google is the leading search engine on the web, it still has its own issues. Google has been criticized on their methods used to collect, use, and secure users' personal information. This can generally be called Privacy Concerns. Google admits in their privacy policy to tracking users' browser preferences and search trends with its use of cookies to target suitable advertisements to people across the web. Google also stores this personal information, including IP adresses, for a up to 9 months. This time frame is 3 months in excess of what the European Union accepts for IP storage. Google has added a link to their privacy policy on their homepage and are known to value their users' privacy "first and formost".


 * Another issue with privacy concerns that has come up is in regards to the satellite images in the Street View program. This desktop program gives panoramic views of streetscapes. Google has filed a statement that concludes with the present satellite technology, it is not a possibility to have complete privacy. This issue will likely become more urgent for Google to tend to, as more and more people become aware of the privacy violation.


 * Google also has competition. Other corporations, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, are constantly investing money to gain aquisitions and develop new products to become stronger competition for Google. Microsoft hired a former search engineer from Yahoo (Qi Lu) to make a search engine to challenge Google's.


 * Because Google relies on the internet in such a large way, it is vulnerable. The things on the web that can effect this vulnerability are:
 * Hackers who disrupt internet traffic.
 * Terrorists that may impose an attack on Internet infrastructure.
 * Internet content that is filtered by government officials.

Technology / Advances
Unique page ranking technology supported by Google's own servers are major factors in Google's success. According to Google's Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, Google is now operating the world's largest distributed computer system. Even though Google is mainly concentrated on being the best at search, the company also provides highly popular Web portals such as Email (Gmail), blogging portal (Blogger), as well as photo sharing portal (Picasa). Other products that Google offers include an online image library (Google Images), general news stories (Google News), financial news (Google Finance), interactive maps (Google Maps), and comparison shopping services (Google Product Search). In 2008 the company launched its own Web browser, Google Chrome. All of these products are made for user to fully enjoy his/her digital part of life.

Google Vs. Yahoo!
A table has been put together to show the differences in technology between Yahoo! and Google:


 * Google is the most popular search engine, and Yahoo! is the second-most popular
 * Both websites use robot crawlers for their index results; Googlebot is twice as active as Yahoo! crawler
 * Yahoo!'s limit for the text of webpages indexed is 5-times that of Google's. This means that Google's search results will be more refined and relevant that Yahoo!'s.
 * Google's index is twice that of Yahoo!'s.
 * The index size for Google is shown to be 4.3 billion documents, and Yahoo!'s is shown to be 2.1 billion documents; Google's index is twice that of Yahoo!'s
 * Both Google and Yahoo! have an advanced search option, to increase specificity and accuracy of the results. Google's advanced search option is found on the main page. Yahoo's advanced search, however, is difficult to find; one has to search something first in order to be given the advanced search option.
 * Yahoo uses Altavista, AlltheWeb, and Inktomi as paid inclusion programs to enhance its search engine. Google, however, only uses its results when someone is searching with Google.

Statistics
Students in CPC 203 over the last 5 semesters were asked to fill out a survey and list their top 5 most visited websites. Here are the results of the survey, which compare the popularity of Google and Yahoo!:




 * The results of the survey show that Google is fives times more popular than Yahoo! in CPSC 203 students.

Search popularity of the 5 core search engines in the United States has been tracked for many years. Here is a pie chart of the percentage of searches in the US in June 2008, tracked by comScore:




 * As seen here, Google triples the search popularity of Yahoo! in the United States.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there is no single factor that leads to Google's success, but the combination of the following: First, Google's leading edge technology - a unique link analysis algorithm combined with custom built servers enable Google to provide end user with the best search engine experience on the web. Second, Sergey and Larry have built an almost perfect business model, by making the right decisions and concentrating on the company's brand recognition from the very beginning. Finally, company's efforts in developing new products and improving the existing ones will keep Google very competitive and on the top of the World Wide Web.

Pictures

 * Image of man shaking fist: Moran, Linda. "Too many habits to change?" March 23, 2007. http://www.lindamoran.net/images/shakingfist
 * Image of Google headquarters: McCullagh, Declan. March, 2004. "Declan McCullagh Photography" http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/10d-13/google-headquarters-2
 * Image of Google/Yahoo scale: ADSL FAQs. July 1, 2008. "Las Paginas Flash Seran Indexables Por Google Y Yahoo" http://www.adslfaqs.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/google-vs-yahoo-compressed-2
 * Image of Google's 10th aniversary: Google at 10 illustration: Brian Taylor / For The Los Angeles Times. September 7, 2008. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/09/google-at-10-ti.html
 * Image of Google vs. Yahoo!: http://www.trendyink.net/blog/2009/03/05/yahoo-ruins-its-own-image-search-in-favor-of-profits/
 * Image of Pie chart Search engine popularity: Sullivan, Danny. "comScore: Yahoo & Microsoft Gain Share But Google Breaks 7 Billion Searches" July 18, 2008 http://www.flickr.com/photos/searchengineland/2681113482
 * Image of Microsoft and Yahoo: Darcy, Sean. "Yahoo talks with Microsoft, again" June 26, 2008.http://www.halflifesource.com/yahoo/article2525.html
 * Image of Yahoo! Logo: Swisher, Kara. "Kara Visits the Yahoo Annual Meeting!" August 4, 2008. http://kara.allthingsd.com/tag/flip/
 * Image of Google crown on world: Sung's Blog. "Google’s Plan for World Domination" August 15, 2005. http://www.sungsblog.com/2005/08/googles-plan-for-world-domination/
 * Image of Jerry and Dave: http://soe.stanford.edu/about/AR95-96/jerry.html