Yahoo! also offers a dedicated keyword you can use to search for the latest
news headlines on a specific topic. When you use the news keyword, Yahoo!
displays the top three current headlines, Click any
headline link to display the full story.


To use this keyword, enter the following into the Yahoo! search box: news topic.
For example, to display the latest headlines about Iraq, enter news iraq.

In addition to the advanced search operators discussed in Secret #2, Yahoo!
includes a number of keywords you can use to conduct specific types of
searches directly from the search box on the Yahoo! home page. The first one
we’ll look at is the keyword weather, which you use to search for local weather
forecasts.
To use this keyword, enter the keyword followed by the city and state that
you’re interested in, like this: weather city state. For example, if you want to
display the weather forecast for Chicago, enter weather chicago il into the
search box, then click the Search button. (You can also enter weather zipcode
to display the forecast for a larger area.) Yahoo! will dipslay a Yahoo! Weather
box, like the one shown in Figure 1-5, with the current conditions and forecast,
along with a link to a five-day forecast.

Just because you conduct one type of Yahoo! search doesn’t mean you can’t
expand your query into other types of searches. It’s as easy as clicking a new
tab on your search results page.
As you can see in Figure 1-4, there are a series of tabs at the top of each search
results page. These tabs are:


Web—The default Web search using Google’s search index


Images—Finds related photographs and images


Directory—Finds related sites listed in the Yahoo! directory


Yellow Pages—Finds related businesses


News—Searches Yahoo! News for related stories


Products—Searches Yahoo! Shopping for matching products

As you’re discovering, Yahoo! offers a variety of search options. There’s Yahoo!
Web Search (via Google) and the Yahoo! directory, as well as separate news,
image, map, product, and Yellow Pages searches.
While you can go to each of these search pages separately, they’re all easily
accessed from the Yahoo! Search page (search.yahoo.com), shown in Figure
1-3. Just click the icon for the type of search you want to conduct, and then start
searching!

Okay, here’s another function Yahoo! shares with Google—image search. When
you access Yahoo!’s Search for Images page (img.search.yahoo.com) you’re
actually accessing Google Image Search. That’s not a bad thing; Google Image
Search is one of the best search indexes on the Web for photographs, pictures,
and other graphics. If you want to find a picture of something, this is the search
to use.
I won’t go into how to use Yahoo!’s image search function, as it’s virtually iden­
tical to that of Google Image Search. Read the section on Google Image Search
in Chapter 6 to learn more.

As you just learned, Yahoo!’s Web Search is powered by Google, which means
you can use all of Google’s advanced search operators to construct your search
queries. If that sounds too complicated, you can perform most of the same oper­
ations using Yahoo!’s Advanced Search page. The nice thing about using
Advanced Search is that you don’t have to remember those fancy operators.
Just select the options you want from those listed and click the Search button;
Yahoo! does the rest.
You access the Advanced Search page by clicking the Advanced link next to a
particular page’s Search button. Each type of Yahoo! search has its own specific
Advanced Search page; for example, the Advanced Web Search page (shown
in Figure 1-2) includes options specific to Web searching, while the Advanced
Directory Search page includes options for finding categories in the Yahoo!
directory.

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.