Is Yahoo a search engine?

When the user gets a bit familiar with Yahoo, they have a doubt in mind that whether Yahoo is a search engine or web browser. Often user gets confused between the search engine and web browser. A question always comes to everyone's mind - is Yahoo a search engine. So, the answer is - Yes, Yahoo is a search engine.

There is no place of confusion. Get it clear in your mind that Yahoo is a search engine, not a web browser. Later we will discuss the difference between the search engine and web browser as well in this chapter.

Yahoo is a search engine, was very popular in past days. In addition to a searching platform, it also provided other services to its users, such as Yahoo mail, etc. When Google entered to market, it has gained more popularity than Yahoo. Now, Google has almost replaced Yahoo by providing an easy interface to use and simplicity.

What is Yahoo?

Yahoo is one of the most known search engines around the world after Google. Yahoo is an American company. It was first launched in 1990's. Yahoo provides several other facilities to its users other than search engines platform. Yahoo offers Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Dictionary, Yahoo Maps, and many more services.

The acronym of Yahoo is - "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

Earlier, Yahoo was the famous search engine when it launched and gained too much popularity as well. Later Google came to the market and gained more popularity than Yahoo. Although Yahoo still has a significant share of search activity but you can see that how less share it contributes than Google search engine.

Features of Yahoo

Yahoo offers several unique features than the other search engines, which are discussed below:

Simple and easy user interface

Yahoo provides a simple and easily understandable user interface. Users can quickly learn and interact with it to search the information on the World Wide Web. Its home page is not so messy one can use it very easily.

Get Personal

Yahoo added the frequently used Yahoo services to its home page to enhance the user experience and usability. This provides faster access to its user to use the Yahoo services in a single tap from the home page.

Effective web search

Yahoo provides effective web search features to users. It uses powerful algorithm and crawlers that helps it to list the webpages related to user query and keywords.

Image Search

Besides the keyword web search, Yahoo added a new feature that makes it easy for the users to search the product or information about it using the image. Simply say that - Yahoo allows image search on the World Wide Web to get information about a particular product.

For Example - If a user does not know the name of the product, he/she can search it using its images also.

Compose Email directly from Yahoo search box

Yahoo offers a different and unique feature than other search engines. In Yahoo search engine, the user can directly compose the email from the search box.

For Example - Type !mail [email protected] in Yahoo search bar and press Enter. Yahoo will automatically create an email for you in Yahoo mail.

Fast access

Yahoo personalized the home page and added its services, such as Finance, sports, shopping, and other services, at the down left side of the page to access them fast. So, its direct links save the time of users spending in search.

How search engine is different from web browser?

Search engines and web browsers are not the same things. Both are different terms, not the same. For instance - Yahoo is a search engine while Chrome is a web browser. So, don't be confused between them and keep the difference in mind.

Note: To clear the confusion, learn that Google is a search engine while Chrome is a web browser.

It is very important to know the difference between search engines and web browsers for those users who are always confused between both of them. See their differences listed below:

How does a search engine work?

Search engines perform three different tasks whenever user search information on it. Search engines crawl the information on the web and index the search result. At last, they show the most suited result to the users for their queries.

Thereby, search engines use different components for each task to be performed.

Components of search engines

A search engine has three main components: Crawler, Index, Search algorithm. All three components do some important tasks for the search engine. Let's discuss in detail to understand them better.

Crawler

Crawlers are basically software programs that are also referred to as bots. Crawlers scan the website automatically on a regular basis to discover the updates in URLs, links, and keywords.

Index

As we already discussed that the crawler scans the websites regularly. The results got from it, are indexed. Simply says that - an index is created of URLs, links, and keywords to make the search result more effective for the users.

Search Algorithm

Search Algorithm is one of the essential parts of any search engine. It completes all the search process behind the search engines. The whole search process mechanism is managed by it of the search engine. It finds the best suitable webpages from the index by matching the keyword with user query requests.