[MWMedia]

Yahoo Introduces Its Own Search Engine
By Jim Hedger, SEO Manager, StepForth.com


Yahoo unleashed the biggest surprise of the year today with the formal introduction of their own search engine. While the vast majority of search engine analysts were expecting Yahoo to simply adopt results from the powerful Inktomi database, Yahoo has been quietly and apparently quite effectively developing their own spider, database and ranking algorithms. Last month, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel announced that Yahoo would be moving away from results licensed from Google's database by the end of this quarter. The move to produce in-house search results is part of the growing competition in the search engine industry. The sector is currently dominated by three big players, Yahoo, MSN and Google. Until recently, Google was considered the most important search engine to be ranked on, however, the changes made by Yahoo and the anticipated arrival of MSN's own, proprietary search engine have changed the perceptions of many webmasters and search engine analysts. Where there was once only one, there are now three, opening the doors to more competition, better pricing and hopefully better results from all three.