Why are some search engines more effective than others?

Factual Questions
1

Google.com…perhaps one of the greatest gifts to mankind since the thong. Why does it kick so much more ass than Yahoo, and other search engines? Example: at one point I was looking up song lyrics for a musical project on Yahoo. I went to “music”. I then went to “lyrics”. Eventually I was lead to an alphabet, at which time I had to choose the first letter of the band name that did the song I was seeking. Then I had to scroll through a thousand and one bands that started with that letter to find the band…and so on, and so on, yadi yada.

Enter Google.com, the darling of the internet. Type in Aerosmith mama kin lyrics…BOOM! 23 sites pop up, all containing the information I requested. Why does Yahoo stroke and tease me, giving me my answer when it’s damned well ready, while Google delivers with the grace and readiness of a well paid prostitute? Are the internet rags at Yahoo so much more inept than the lovely providers of information at Google? Please tell me!!! I’m plagued with self doubt of my own masculinity, and I hope this will restore my manhood.

Thanks! (-: p.s. Just joined…this is my first post. Treat me gently…like a virgin with a trembling hymen. (-;

2

Until somebody more knowledgable turns up…

IIRC, where most search engines try to calculate the relevance of a page from it’s contents, Google goes further by cross referencing it with the calculated relevance of pages which link to it. If every Aerosmith page on the planet included links to one particular Aerosmith page, that is probably the most kick ass Aerosmith page there is.

3

Also, unless you were using Yahoo’s search engine (which, IIRC, is powered by Google anyway), Yahoo isn’t a true search engine at all. It’s a hierarchical collection of links manually reviewed and added - so it’s inevitably smaller given the disparity between the growth rates in web pages and their resources available to review and add links.

4

Forgot to add:

Yahoo is better when you’re interested in a broad subject area and want to see what’s around and what sub-categories are included without irrelevant search results. Google’s better for specific searches, when you know exactly what you want.