“You Could Go To Google,” Says Yahoo — But Why Not Stay Here?

Dec 4, 2008 at 1:20pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Yahoo has changed the way they handle a query for a competing search engine. Now, if you search at Yahoo for google, live or ask.com, Yahoo will tell you, “You could go to [Search Engine Name Goes Here]. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

This is a lot more humorous than what Yahoo did in the past. I have a screen capture of how Yahoo handled this in the past at the Search Engine Roundtable. Here it is:

You won’t always get a search box, I believe if you refresh your search, Yahoo may remove the search box. Here is a picture of the same message, without the search box:

Do you get the message? Why go to Google, when you are already at Yahoo? Why not just stay here? I suspect it works because I cannot tell you have many novice searchers use search engines to find other search engines.

Do note, the other three search engines do not currently do anything similar.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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