The Five Things That Yahoo! Search Can Do But Not Google

Google is the world’s favorite web search engine but there are a couple of cool things that you can do only in Yahoo!. Take a look:

1. Compose emails from the Yahoo! search box.

Type !mail abc@xyz.com in the Yahoo! search box and it will automatically compose a new email message for you in Yahoo! mail.

2. Get Lyrics of any song or your favorite artist.

Type madonna lyrics (for lyrics of Madonna songs) or madonna material girl lyrics (for lyrics of a particular song)

3. Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries

Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:

[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.

4. Search your favorite websites from Yahoo! itself.

For instance, type !wiki google in Yahoo! search box to search Google in Wikipedia.com. Other popular shortcuts are !ebay, !amazon, and !flickr. You can also execute these from the Firefox search box without changing the default search engine.

5. linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.

A quick question - Can you find the number of articles on Wikipedia website that link to CNN.com ? It’s almost impossible to get this data from Google but you can do so quite easily in Yahoo! with the incredibly useful linkdomain operator. The answer is:

linkdomain:cnn.com site:wikipedia.org

Or take another example - How many stories on TechCrunch actually link to the PayPerPost, Arrington’s favorite topic. The answer here is:

site:techcrunch.com linkdomain:payperpost.com

Read some more practical examples of Yahoo! linkdomain operator. Know some more unique features of Yahoo! web search. Share them in the comments.