SEVERAL TRIPS to European cities have shown me good results delivered by Yahoo! onto my mobile phone screens. I've searched for bistros in Paris, museum operating hours in Berlin and watertaxi timetables in Venice. Yahoo! delivered all those results better than any other mobile search service and Yahoo! often provides a very relevant image near the top of the text results. The relevant images, when delivered near the top of the search results, help identify shops from across the street or offer clues for unfamiliar taxi drivers. Recent "real user" search engine studies suggest my experience is not an isolated example. PC World tested 55 services in six categories: general (text info), video, mobile/local, news, images, and blogs. The goal was to simulate how "real people" searched, so no special commands or modifiers were used. Yahoo's index performed better than Google in many cases. And consider something the search engine optimisers already know--Yahoo mines local information through its cross-indexing of Flickr images. You can push up local content by accurately tagging images or deliberately skew results by misidentifying photos by name or geographic location.
Jeff Bertolucci -- "Search Engine Shootout"
Chris Sherman -- "Google Bested in Search Shootout"
Image of Bailey Hotel in Cashel that you find when asking for "Cashel Bailey" on Yahoo! Google does not return the venue's web site at the top of its results.
