I've always liked Yahoo!

I remember the first time I saw the internet. It was sometime in 1996, when I’d heard about “the internet,” but I didn’t really know what it was. I had this vague assumption that it was basically AOL’s network, which I’d seen at my friend’s house. It was so cool.

So I asked my dad if we had “the internet.” He said, yes, let me show you. He openend netscape and showed me Yahoo!

For some reason that fateful first image of the internet, tinged with both disappointment and excitement has stuck with me ever since. And, regardless of who searches the best, Yahoo! has forever been my favorite. I feel like I’m cheating every time I use Google.

Why do I like Yahoo!? Because they’re cool. They get it in ways that lots of companies don’t, and they’re different from Google because they’re an everything company. Google does search extremely well, and everything else is a little bit below par (except gmail, which rules).

Now, Yahoo! is catching on. Maybe they got the idea from the Washington Post, but either way, they’re ahead of the curve.

When I search Yahoo! news, they give me a little sidebar on the right that says “blogs beta,” and lists top blog search results for the same thing. Awesome! Here’s the screen grab:

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I’ve been saying for ages that, in the world of search, “he who makes it easiest” is going to take over the blog-search world.

There was a little lull in Technorati for a while when Google launched, but Technorati has bounced back well enough. My guess? Because Google was unbelievably stupid and made their blog search almost inaccessible.

Let me ask you this: if you have the most popular search start page in the known universe, and you want people to use a new kind of search, where do you put it? According to Google, you put it on your blogging service homepage, and make a separate page for blogsearch. To get to blog search from the Google homepage, the easiest way to do it is to type in the url. That’s idiocy!

If Yahoo! is smart enought to start making blogsearch easily acessible, they could take that market easily. Technorati is doing it’s damndest, but the fact of the matter is, I want ONE place for all my searches. What Technorati ought to have done (is that even english?) is licensed their search to either google or Yahoo or MSN, and then made sure the search could be done from the homepage.