Don’t Forget Yahoo!

Why some Yahoo! features are better than Google’s

We here at VodaHost web hosting are Google power-users and in the last few articles we have focused very much on Google and her services. It would be wrong not to focus on Google; it IS the worlds most used search engine and indeed the world’s most visited website. It has some incredibly useful tools for your business too. Today, however, we are looking at some of the fantastic tools and services of her arch-rival, Yahoo! There are some great services that are absolutely a must for the marketing of your website and should not be forgotten.

According to alexa.com, Yahoo! is currently the fourth most visited website in the world (the third most visited website in the United States) and that’s a lot of visits and a massively used service. Yahoo! were, in-fact, the Google of 10 years ago and had Google not appeared on the scene, would probably have continued to be the leading search engine on the Internet.

Google handles many of our daily web searching needs including email networking, GoogleDocs and Google AdWords etc. and in our opinion, it’s really good; much better than most other Internet companies. However, there are a select few services that you should always turn to Yahoo! for. Why? Well because these are services that Yahoo! does way better or that Google just simply doesn’t offer.

So, here are 7 things that Yahoo! does better than Google:

1. Personal Finance: Yahoo! Finance contains a massive amount of original content that easily rivals some of the biggest financial sites in the industry (and that includes sites like CNN Money, TheStreet.com, etc.). The interface is very easy to find your way around and is perfectly accessible to both new investors and longtime financial gurus. If you and your website deal in finances then you MUST reference this excellent tool. Google Finance is coming along, but it just simply isn’t as good.

2. Answers to Questions:: Yahoo! Answers allows users to ask questions or answer other user’s questions; it’s a little bit like a massive forum and it’s a simple concept that works really well for Yahoo! and is a wonderful way to get answers to all your questions very fast. Google has no such active service. The closest competition on the web right now is Ask MetaFilter… also a great question/answer service but Yahoo! Answers is our favorite.

3. Website Backlink Info: Most webmasters like to know exactly how many sites are linking to their various websites. Yahoo! makes this especially easy with their “linkdomain:” search operator. It quickly provides a full list of incoming links to any given domain. Let’s say your domain name is “yourdomain.com”; simply type “linkdomain:yourdomain.com” (without the “s) in to Yahoo! search and you’ll see all the pages that link to any page within your domain. For some reason Google does not publicly disclose this backlink information, but instead provides only a small sample of quality incoming links to a given domain via it’s “link:” search operator. Google does provide the Google Webmaster Tools service that will give you backlink information for a specific domain but only once you sign up and prove to Google that you are the owner of the domain.

4. Image Hosting and Sharing: In the same way that Google purchased YouTube for Web 2.0 video sharing, with its purchase of Flickr, Yahoo! now rules the Web 2.0 photo sharing market and Flickr is currently the king over all the other photo sharing sites out there. It’s fantastic site and very easy to get lost in for an hour or so. A great way to host images for your website and to get some quality links for your website.

5. Local Search: If you are looking for businesses around your town or city, Yahoo! Local is a step ahead of Google. While Google can perform local searches in a variety of different ways through their standard search interface and Google Maps application, Yahoo! Local is a more polished service that puts all local search capabilities on one convenient page. Yahoo! local is sort of like a digital Yellow Pages and listing your business here is a great move.

6. Entertainment Portal: From music to online games to sports, Yahoo! Entertainment provides a solid entertainment web portal capable of satisfying all the various entertainment and leisure user demographics. For better or for worst, Google isn’t trying to be an entertainment portal, so it doesn’t even come close to competing with Yahoo! in this regard. Another great resource for those interested in Entertainment.

7. Privacy Policy: Yahoo! is arguably better with the privacy concerns of its users. Certainly this point could be debated in favor of either company, but there seems to be more public controversy surrounding Google’s privacy policies. Like most, we suck it up and use Google’s services anyway but why let Google have access to all your info? Use Yahoo! and this will no longer be a concern to you…