Google vs Yahoo!

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Battles of the Two Goliaths

Ever wondered what’s the different between these two ‘goliaths’? I still remember those years in my university days. At that time, Yahoo was the most popular web search engines, not to mention the Yahoo Mail as well.

Then, things started changing. Google was born … and the battle begins.

Do you know that both Google and Yahoo were created by students from Stanford University in California?

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo started a list of web pages in a campus trailer, as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. The lists were published in a web site named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", and it grew larger and larger and soon was required to be organised into categories and subcategories in hierarchy.

By the end of that year, Yahoo had already received close to a million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated. Soon, Yahoo bought over RocketMail and converted it into Yahoo Mail.

As for Google, it all started as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in January 1996 (two years later than Yahoo). Both Ph.D students hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.

Google web search engines indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operator. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more. And of course, the ever popular … Gmail.
Do you know that Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores personal information for 18 months and by comparison, Yahoo and AOL(Time Warner) retain search requests for 13 months only? So far, there is no misusing of information … yet. Hope it will stays that way.

Ranking in terms of market share in the search engine category:
Google @ 53.6%
Yahoo @ 19.9%
Live Search @ 12.9%
Others @ 13.6%