Google or Yahoo?

This used to be obvious and I think alot of people still think it is. An estimate I heard recently from a search engine optimization guru friend of mine was that 70% of all referrals from search engines at least come from Google on a fully optimized site. So going by that Google must be more than twice as good as all the rest of the competition.

Google established itself as a fresh ideological company that did things right through simplicity (Less is more) and a brilliant search engine algorithm which took in page relevance for the first time.

Other search engines struggled to keep pace and now Google is recognized by nearly everyone on the net as the only place to go to.

But have we got caught up in the brand? Recently I found Yahoo! to be way more effective in finding relevant results. This may have just been a one off scenario I can’t be sure about this yet until I try with alot more samples.

But more worryingly have a look at the results page from google. It has a ratio of 9/3 for ’sponsored ads’ vs actual results on the screen of a 1024*768 resolution(standard laptop resolution) without any scrolling. The sponsored links above the real results is 3 high for popular search terms.

So Google is better again why?

1. More clutter
2. Less accurate

Were these not the reasons we left Yahoo! and MSN in the first place?

New homepage: Yahoo! Search

Update:

A screen shot of yahoo results