Yahoo! Search
163
Yahoo! Search Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search URL
search.yahoo.com
Commercial?
Yes
Type of site
Search Engine
Registration
Optional
[1]
Available language(s) Multilingual (40) Owner
Yahoo!
Created by
Yahoo!
Launched
March 1, 1995
Alexa rank Current status
[2]
4 (February 2011) Active
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December 2009, the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications.[3] Originally, Yahoo! Search started as a web directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In the late 1990s, Yahoo! evolved into a full-fledged portal with a search interface and, by 2007, a limited version of selection-based search. Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would send queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of sites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by Yahoo! itself. In 2001 the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and later was powered by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.[] All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.[4]
Search technology acquisition Seeking to provide its own search engine results, Yahoo! acquired their own search technology. In 2002, they bought Inktomi, a "behind the scenes" or OEM search engine provider, whose results are shown on other companies' websites and powered Yahoo! in its earlier days. In 2003, they purchased Overture Services, Inc., which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though Yahoo! owned multiple search engines, they didn't use them on the main yahoo.com website, but kept using Google's search engine for its results. Starting in 2003, Yahoo! Search became its own web crawler-based search engine, with a reinvented crawler called Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo! Search combined the capabilities of all the search engine companies they had acquired, with its existing research, and put them into a single search engine. The new search engine results were included in all of Yahoo!'s sites that had a web search function. Yahoo! also started to sell the search engine results to other