The Five Things That Yahoo! Search Can Do But Not Google
Google is the world’s favorite web search engine but there are a couple of cool things that you can do only in Yahoo!. Take a look:
1. Compose emails from the Yahoo! search box.
Type !mail abc@xyz.com in the Yahoo! search box and it will automatically compose a new email message for you in Yahoo! mail.
2. Get Lyrics of any song or your favorite artist.
Type madonna lyrics (for lyrics of Madonna songs) or madonna material girl lyrics (for lyrics of a particular song)
3. Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries
Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:
[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.
4. Search your favorite websites from Yahoo! itself.
For instance, type !wiki google in Yahoo! search box to search Google in Wikipedia.com. Other popular shortcuts are !ebay, !amazon, and !flickr. You can also execute these from the Firefox search box without changing the default search engine.
5. linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.
A quick question - Can you find the number of articles on Wikipedia website that link to CNN.com ? It’s almost impossible to get this data from Google but you can do so quite easily in Yahoo! with the incredibly useful linkdomain operator. The answer is:
linkdomain:cnn.com site:wikipedia.org
Or take another example - How many stories on TechCrunch actually link to the PayPerPost, Arrington’s favorite topic. The answer here is:
site:techcrunch.com linkdomain:payperpost.com
Read some more practical examples of Yahoo! linkdomain operator. Know some more unique features of Yahoo! web search. Share them in the comments.
Related: Prevent Google from Recording Your Search Habits
Written by Amit Agarwal, professional blogger and technology columnist. Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Subscribe in a reader
You can do #3 in Google too - you just have to enclose it in quotes, like so: “Sylvestor Stallone”.
Hi Amit
I hate to say this but you are wrong on two counts. First, you can search a site from within Google, using the “site:” operator.
Second, you can search for lyrics on Google. I do it often.
Make it “The Four Things…” You can search favorite web site (#4) in Google by prefixing the search string(s) with “site:site.domain”, e.g.:
site:labnol.org software
And you can do it directly from the Firefox search box, too.
As mentioned in http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/help/operators.html , it IS possible to filter by linked sites by using the ‘link:’ operator, which is obviously shorter than ‘linkdomain’.
As Alek notes, the ’site:’ operator is also helpful.
To specify the order of keywords, we can use double quotes. For example, “Digital Inspiration”.
So it seems the only remaining Yahoo! Exclusives are Lyrics & Compose-from-search. Good enough for me! Good find Amit!!
http://smplr.com/
Suddenly #4 seems a bit more primitive.
Also, the brackets don’t seem to work on Yahoo! for me. For instance, try [rocks Firefox] and the second result says “Firefox 3 UI rocks” in bold. The best way, which works on both search engines is just to use quotes.
For the lyrics feature, the first thing tried didn’t turn out too well. I tried “lifesong lyrics” (sans quotes). Since it includes the search corrections in the results, it also includes them in the lyrics finder. I got the song “Life Song” instead. Eve when it does work, it seems pointless. I tried several songs from different genres on Google followed by lyrics and still found what I wanted on the first result (or a little further down when more than one group had done a song by the same title).
For number 1, I honestly don’t want Google to get to the point of combing GMail that much into a search engine. Then they are starting to monopolize.
Number 5 would be useful though.
As usually the google fanboys emerge from the alley…
About the Square Brackets
The square brackets are different from quotes - they are for meant for specify the order of terms in the web page. Quotes will look for that exact phrase on the web page.
For instance “Bill Clinton” will show only pages that contain Bill Clinton while [Bill Clinton] will show pages where you have “Bill Clinton” or “The surname of Bill is Clinton” but not “Clinton Bill”.
About the site: operator
There’s a difference between the site: operator of Google and the Yahoo! search shortcuts with the exclamation mark.
For instance:
The Google query “site:flickr.com rainbow” will show Flickr webpages that mention rainbow but when you use “!flickr rainbow”, it shows the rainbow related photos on Flickr website.
!ebay blackberry will run the search for blackberry phones on ebay website not on Yahoo!
“site:wikipedia.org Google” will show wikipedia web pages that mention google while “!wiki Google” in Yahoo! will take you to the Google page on Wikipedia.
Actually, Amit, that’s what the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is for. When you use the site: operator, like ’site:wikipedia.org Google’ you’ll be taken to the entry on Google at Wikipedia. And have you heard of wildcards? That’d be how to search for Sylvester Stallone where Sylvester comes before Stallone using quotes on Google.
And based on the above comments, it looks like the only thing Yahoo can do is shortcut to your mail. How impressive :P
#5 is interesting !!
Google has a “link:” operator too, but it shows websites which link to a particular PAGE, not the entire domain.
Cool find.
site:wikipedia.org link:*cnn.com
Took about 3 seconds to come up with that one.
If you type “Sylvester * Stallone” in Google’s search box you will get the same as the [Sylvester Stallone] in Yahoo.
Google fan boys: chill out, and read the damn article in full, and then also Amit’s response to your comments.
the “site:” flag is very different than the “open shortcuts” that yahoo has which allow you to search different search engines all together! type in “!help” in yahoo search and you will see.
Wrong answer Eric, Google is searching for words “link” and “cnn.com” in wikipedia
@Vivek: Eric should have written:
site:wikipedia.org *.cnn.com
I’m sure THAT works! :)
Wow, while I like the effort to try and pull people away from google, you must realize that the people go there for a reason. Google has most of these functions, if not all. Please do the proper research before posting something. “A” for effort though! ;)
Actually - Firefox and Greasemonkey together can pretty much take Google or Yahoo and make them do what you want.
I already change the picture capabilities of Google Images and make it relink all the images to directly show the image when you click it. Very simple script in GM. Sad thing is - every engine has it’s pros and cons but you can make shortcuts to do the same thing Yahoo does with the !ebay and such yourself. I’ve already done that with keywords to replace the (search term) in a URL so that my shortcut is even better as it avoids Yahoo and Google altogether…
Where there’s a will there’s a way.
@Wire: there’s a huge difference between defending your preferred search engine in a discussion and protecting your preferred search engine with non-sense arguments and putting it overall, whether it deserves or not.
Fanboys do the second. To see an example, check out threads like “Mac is a PC too,” you’ll see dozens of macfanboys that think they’re overall for spending some extra bucks on a PC.
@Wire: while other mac users will give you good arguments for putting mac overall (and when a windows user answering with an argument so good or better, a mac fanboy enters the discussion saying “my mac pwnz”, followed by a micro$oft funboy “windows rlz”)
Nearly every one of these searches can be performed within Google, with the exception of Number 1, which is more of an inhouse shortcut than anything else.
2) Get Lyrics of any song or your favorite artist.
Simply search for ‘artist lyrics’ (without the single quotes)
e.g. - ‘madonna material girl lyrics’ (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=madonna+material+girl+lyrics&btnG=Search&meta=)
3) Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries
Not so much specifying the order keywords must appear in the page, but phrases are more widely supported anyway.
e.g. - ‘”Sylvester Stallone”‘ (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Sylvester+Stallone%22&btnG=Search)
4) Search your favorite websites from Yahoo! itself.
OK, so shortcuts may not be available within Google, but searching for content within a specified domain, or subdomain is very easy. (There are even some bookmarklets which are specifically for this.)
e.g. - ’site:wikipedia.org google’ (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+google&btnG=Search)
5) linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.
This is also doable with Google.
e.g. ’site:*.wikipedia.org link:*.cnn.com’ (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3A*.wikipedia.org+link%3A*.cnn.com&btnG=Search)
LAWLZ
What a lame list… not only does Google do most f those things (nice job researching) but the ones it doesn’t are not at all impressive.
Someone said “here come the google fanboys” but this is just Yahoo fanboyism to me.
How about one thing Google search can do that Yahoo search can’t:
1) Show me relevant results that don’t make me want to throw my mouse against the wall.
About #4 IMHO ‘define:’ is more powerful operator with Google. For instance ‘define: google’. Try it in the google search box without quotes.
My top google operators:
1. define:
2. site:
3. stocks:
And last one but not least: Reference to google search feature: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
I get the feeling that most of the complaints from the Googlers could have been avoided if they had just read the whole text and thought about it a couple of seconds, before making statements that are clearly wrong.
I know that Google has great shortcuts. I use “define:” and the calculator often. But that doesn’t mean that Yahoo doesn’t have nice shortcuts too.
About #2: It’s not about getting a search result when you search for lyrics, all search engines should be able to do that. What Yahoo does that makes them different, is that the first result you get comes from Yahoo itself. “lyrics” is obviously a keyword that fetches content from Yahoo’s own servers.
1. That’s a trivial feature that can be added without too much effort. You could also use aliases in your browser and type that query in the address bar.
Conclusion=you can do this in your browser.
2. Yahoo shows a list of results from their lyrics site, but there are thousands of sites that have these lyrics. You get the same things (if not more) from other sites in the search results.
Conclusion=nothing interesting here
3. Here’s how you can do this in Google: search for “Sylvester * Stallone”.
Conclusion=inaccurate
4. You’re using the same argument like #1. It’s the same feature.
Conclusion=the same as for #1
5. Google doesn’t have this operator and you also can’t combine site: with link:. Yahoo shows more links than Google when you use the link: operator.
Conclusion=advanced operator, very few people know about it or use it.
Side note: Yahoo has many other features not available at Google.
The args are getting repetitive. Moving right along …
#1: Doesn’t really add a lot of functionality, when everything and its dog is an email client. And wouldn’t you have to log in to Yahoo! to be able to send the email?
#2: Any search engine can do this.
#3: Nice - if it works (see previous comments).
#4: Opera (and, recently, other browsers) not only does this directly from the address bar, but with less characters, and you can add any sites you want and customise the search keyword. Why limit yourself to only the Yahoo-approved sites with clunky keywords?
#5: Google’s version, link:sitename, is currently less powerful, but it would probably be ten seconds’ work for them to add a linkdomain filter. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were Greasemonkey scripts around which already did something similar. Now what would be actually USEFUL for either search engine would be the ability to use full regex strings for that filter.
FREE SPEECH! NOW! RIGHT TO TELL WHAT YOU MEAN!
First thing: I am someone who uses Yahoo as his primary search engine (and as email, bookmarks, maps and everything)
Second: All those people who say that they understand what Amit wrote in here and then counter it by giving examples like using “Quoted Text” and shortcuts like site:anysite.domain need to actually go to yahoo and perform these searches. You will see the difference.
Difference 1
searching for “Quoted Text” means you even specify the spacing and you are looking for EXACT string.. but when you say [bracketed words] in yahoo, you instead tell just the ORDER of the words.. they can have any number of words in there between them.
Difference 2
!wiki google, this phrase on yahoo will return not a Yahoo page, but instead it will be actually wikipedia performing a search on keyword google. Moreover, there is something that AMit missed. If you are logged in while making this search, you can actually specify your own shortcuts. I have made shortcuts like !gs for google scholar, !yt for youtube. Ushing these shortcuts will give me searched from the respective site itself and is entirely different then using site:anysite.domain thing.
to search for Sylvester Stallone in google, just enter :-
“Sylvester Stallone”
amit, #1 and #5 is really an eye-opener. never in a million years that I know these functions exists within Yahoo!
But that’s because yahoo uses a predefined algorithm but google uses artificial intelligence algortihms in which are more dependent on popularity of pages..Basically both google and yahoo are reverse in search engines..
Google sucks. done.
Google is better in providing contextual ads as it contains a huge number of advertisers. And also the YPN is limited to around UK and US.
Actually the tip #3 doesn’t work. There’s absolutely no difference between the results for [search terms] and search terms. Even the number of results is identical.
What’s interesting is that Google has a way to find pages that mention two terms sequentially: “search * terms” (note the asterisk that works as a wildcard).