Yahoo! Search has introduced a Google clone search page but who will see it? If you visit the Yahoo home page, you’ll see a couple of hundred links to all their services such as Yahoo Jobs, Yahoo Dating, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Stores, Yahoo News, Yahoo Web Hosting, “More Yahoo” and “Even MORE Yahoo” links near the bottom of the home page, blah blah blah, etc. But they’ve put up an elegant Google clone for their search page at search.yahoo.com. That nobody will ever see unless it is bookmarked or typed directly into the browser address bar!
Yes, you can search from the Yahoo home page and that is the most prominent of all the Yahoo’s glut of stuff, but I’ll bet they posted this spare little copy of Google’s home page to appease those who don’t want to wade through the rest of the mess to get to search. This placement means that only those of us that purposely AVOID their home page and jump right to search by typing http://search.yahoo.com/ into the address bar will find that page. That’s the equivalent of MSN of course where you must type in http://search.msn.com to see THEIR spare search page. But MSN has at least kept some elements of branding in the design of that page, while Yahoo has made their page LOOK like the Google home page with a Yahoo logo.
I can’t wait to see if they integrate Yahoo Desktop Search into the browser in the same way Google did . . . Stay Tuned.
