Don’t get me wrong we buy paid inclusion all the time in Yahoo for clients, however we never spend any extra time on Yahoo or MSN results. We only play on Google, if Google likes us, it is clear that Yahoo and MSN place us in the same ballpark as Google does. We do want that 10%, but we place more importance on raising all traffic volume, not on improving our percentage results.

I do need to clear up something about the paid inclusion. Yahoo paid inclusion is run the same way that Googles Adwords is. So you can rank for natural search number 1 in organic returns. Also on I wouldn’t snuff at 10%. The amount of “extra” work it takes to rank in yahoo as WELL as google is minimal at most, and for something like an e-commerce site, 10% increase in overall cash flow is something to look into.

All that said, Google is definitely the dominate Engine both in its ability to crawl, index and return relevant content, and in volume of users.

I totally disagree that Yahoo is superior in search. The major issue with any search in Yahoo is that they have “paid inclusion”, so your natural results are bought by some people. Second and maybe more importantly, the traffic resulting from Yahoo makes up less than 10% of all of our(all 200 + clients) incoming traffic, so placing more value on it than it is worth would just be a waste of money.

If you follow the Yahoo blog (which it looks like you do) you can see that this is part of a trend of Yahoo’s in trying to have a dialog with developers and SEO’s. Even the fact that Yahoo’s link: search is superior to Googles is a clear sign of this.

By the way, could you post the link to the opened up source code for the algo?