Is Yahoo Search Better Than Google?

Posted on March 15, 2008

Google’s advanced search options are pretty good, but Yahoo shows there are ways to define even more restrictions for search results. You might want to find pages that contain mostly text, or those that refer to videos or include tables. It’s possible to use some of these restriction searches at Yahoo, where you can use the feature: operator.

russia rivers feature:table - web pages that contain tables

texas country feature:audio - web pages that link to audio files

bill clinton feature:video - web pages that link to video files

ebay training feature:acrobat - search results that link to PDF files

bob dylan feature:activex - search results that contain the object tag (e.g.: embedded YouTube videos or any other Flash object)

You can also use the operator to remove some classes of web pages. If you want to filter web pages that use JavaScript, add -feature:script:

To find web pages that link to files with a certain extension, use the linkextension: operator. For example, linkextension:vob beatles finds web pages about the Beatles that link to .vob video files.

Yahoo has another interesting operator (depth:) that lets you define the maximum number of subdirectories from your search results’ URLs. For example, a search for google tips depth:1 will include www.google.com/help/features.html because it has a single directory, but not www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/04/google-tips-pulled, which has three directories. This could be useful to find web pages that are important relative to the structure of a web site.