Yahoo!

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Yahoo is the most famous and, possibly, the most popular internet search engine. It's the engine most beginners start with, and it is a good start for newbies. It also has some strong features for the expert searcher. Above all else, Yahoo is a hierarchical directory. This means everything in it is categorized and organized in some logical fashion. It is easy to dig deep into this tree structure whether you start with the mother tree itself on the home page or you start with a search and arrive somewhere out on a limb. The value added of a directory like this is the organization of similar things in one place. The drawback of this is that it is difficult for website owners to contribute to more than one category. This means that complex websites are not going to be well represented in the various categories it covers and many gems of information they contain cannot be revealed by Yahoo. Another drawback is that it can take months for a site to get listed and sometimes they don't get listed for any apparent reason. Yahoo generally covers the major single subject sites well. In addition to its simple query interface, Yahoo has a more powerful screening capability hidden behind the options on its search page. Those options are all available on this page. If a subject is important to you, you should also search elsewhere. Yahoo makes it somewhat easy to do that also by providing direct links on its pages to other major search engines. A Headlines news service updated hourly by Reuters is also offered. Yahoo provides a list of other features about its service. Help can be found in Yahoo! Help. Yahoo also provides an excellent FAQ that provides information from the basics of the internet up to the very specific Yahoo details. I could not find a web page with information about the Yahoo! Corporation even with a search in Yahoo!

(Last updated 10/11/02)