The New Yahoo! Search is .... Good!

The new Yahoo! search is quite impressive. There doesn't seem to be much difference between Google and Yahoo in terms of the quality of results. In addition -

1. Yahoo! provides good content from inside their network (look at the "Inside Yahoo!" section for this search on "NBA")

2. They provide nice descriptions of the sites from their directories. Google's provides the lines that match the search query - this is more helpful when one is looking for something specific - say "Kobe finals performance", etc. Actually, when I try this search on Yahoo!, I find that Yahoo! also provides the text that matches the query in the description. Yahoo! is probably figuring out when to provide descriptions from its directory and when to provide the lines matching the search query in its site description on the SERP. Good job in any case.

3. Yahoo! also makes suggestions on modifying the search query. This is similar to the Gigabits on Gigablast, and the "Refine" feature of Teoma. I don't use this much, but I coudl imagine it being helpful when you are searching for something you don't know much about (so I tried "cooking" to get the following suggestions from yahoo! - cooking recipes, cooking school, cooking classes, cooking light ... nice)

4. The search speed matches Google's.

Yahoo!'s investments in search company acquisitions (Overture -Altavista - Alltheweb, Inktomi) and internal R&D efforts seem to be paying off.