Yahoo Search Assistant

YAHOO! MAY HELP some people discover new or serendipitous things with its Search Assistant but my first impressions are that it's still not delivering high-quality results when compared to Google. I dabbled a little with the Yahoo! Search Assistant and have a few comments.

1. After asking about my town of Cashel, I toggled into Yahoo! images, expecting to find pointers to Flickr on the first page. That didn't happen. Instead, I found a cluster of images from the same site and one image from a tourist who labeled a shot as the Rock of Cashel when it was actually a ruin from another county.

2. Continuing my quest for information, I wondered if I could get a recommendation for a Cashel restaurant by using no more than three clicks after starting my search. That's probably possible but the first click took me into Yahoo! Travel where there are no restaurants listed for Cashel.

3. Figuring I was a tourist in search of free wifi with my food, I asked Yahoo! Search for "wifi cahir ireland" and the most informative site suggested inside information about three nodes in Cahir that I have used. However, when I went to that site, it wanted to help me connect my wireless journey from either Limerick or Dublin to Cahir and it had all sorts of annoying advertisements blinking at me on screen.

I'll give Yahoo! Search a deeper look, if only because I want to rate quality places so they show up in the Yahoo! Search Assistant. But if I'm in a hurry for accurate information, I will stick with queries I know when using Google and I will back them up with photos I find in Flickr that give me tabletop, bedside or streetside views of places worth visiting.

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