So on February 18th, Yahoo finally brought their new database online based largely on Inktomi technology. However, the rankings are different than previous Inktomi results. Yahoo has made its own tweaks to Inktomi in a first step to call the engine its own. If you're wondering what makes this new engine tick, be sure to check out WebPosition's Page Critic, which has been updated to reflect Yahoo's latest ranking algorithm. More information will be added in the months ahead.

How will this change affect Google? According to Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology: "Losing Yahoo as a customer won't have a significant effect on Google's finances."

More importantly, how will this change affect you? Well, you will definitely want to optimize your site for Yahoo as it now has its own crawler-based search engine technology for the first time. This new engine, like Inktomi, ranks pages based on relevance. The content of your Web site and its relevance to a particular search plays a key role in your page's ranking. Yahoo's importance cannot be understated as it counts itself among the three most popular engines on the Web: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

MSN currently pulls its results from Inktomi, now dubbed the Yahoo Search Engine. Both Yahoo and Google license their search technology to a number of other major players that have their own levels of popularity. Therefore, Yahoo cannot simply claim two thirds of the market share because they serve results on MSN and Yahoo.com. It's a little more complicated than that. However, at a minimum, they do promise to stiffen the competition against Google.

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