Yahoo’s Search engine is broken down into categories and sub categories which allows users to browse through directories down to the levels of information they are seeking. This is a lot more noticeable than many other search engines, which offer many categories but does not specifically split up sub categories into as many options.
Within Yahoo Advanced Search link on the home page, users can perform a variety of different search techniques. There are four main search methods listed under this area.
- Intelligent Default – This is the default that is set for Yahoo under the main search feature on the homepage. It basically performs standard searches that are available on other sites. The facility is also there to use “” quotation marks for phrase searching and + and – symbols to include a specific word or to perform searches on all sites omitting a specific word.
- An exact phrase match – This option allows the user to enter a specific phrase they are looking for. The search engine will only pull results from sources that contain that phrase exactly the same as it was typed in the search box. For example the user may be searching for song lyrics on the Internet, or quotes from literature, in which case only matching results will be given.
- Matches on all words (AND) – If the user wants to search for documents containing a list of words, they can use this feature. It will return results only with documents containing every word listed, if one word is not present the documentation will not be presented. Unlike the exact phrase match, which requires a complete set of words in a specific order, this function only requires that all the words exist within the document and in any order.
- Matches on any word (OR) – Similar to the previous feature in that the search performed scans for documents containing the words listed, however because it is an OR function, results will be pulled with text / documents containing any of the words listed. This is useful for users who cannot be extremely specific on their searches.
Other options within Yahoo to allow for more specific searches on its database include finding categories listed within a certain period of time allowing the user to be more specific about the date of the periodical they are looking for.
When searching the Yahoo database it is possible to specify how many hits thee user would like displayed per page. This allows selection of 10 – 100 results displayed per page. Obviously the faster the Internet connection, the more results would be requested per page.
