Okay, Yahoo! is known for its high-quality and well-organized Web directory.
But when you use Yahoo!’s Web Search feature, you bypass the directory
entirely and instead retrieve results supplied by a third-party search engine.
That’s right. When you use the search box on Yahoo!’s home page, you’re not
searching Yahoo!—you’re searching Google.

For some time now, Yahoo! has supplemented its directory listings with results
from a partner search engine. Early on, Yahoo! offered results from the Inktomi
search engine. Today, Yahoo! uses results provided by Google.

The contract that Yahoo! has with Google is not open-ended, which means
that when the current contract expires, it’s possible that Yahoo! might go
with a different search index provider—such as Inktomi, which Yahoo! pur­
chased in March of 2003, or AllTheWeb or AltaVista, which Yahoo! acquired
later the same year. So it wouldn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to
envision Yahoo! delivering some blend of Inktomi/AllTheWeb/AltaVista
results sometime in the future, either in place of or in addition to the current
Google results.




Do your own comparison. Enter a query into the Yahoo! search box, then go to
Google (www.google.com) and enter the same query. The results should look
familiar.
Since searching with Yahoo! is the same as searching with Google, you can use
Google’s advanced search operators when you conduct a Yahoo! Web Search.
These operators help you fine-tune your search by including or excluding spe­
cific words, searching for exact phrases, and narrowing your search to certain
sites or domains. There’s no point in repeating those operators twice in the
same book, so turn to Chapter 6 to learn more—then utilize those advanced
search operators the next time you construct a query on Yahoo!.



In addition to using Google’s advanced search operators, Yahoo! also has a
few special keywords of its own you can use in the home page search box.
Read Secrets #8 through #12 to learn more.