On the advice of a friend, I switched my default search engine on my iPhone’s Safari browser from Google to Yahoo!. I must say that I’m impressed. What I like most is that it is properly formatted and designed to be used on a mobile device, and specifically the iPhone. Search results are clear, readable, and formatted for easy clicking. The Google search results page still looks like the desktop version (even though it is a mobile version). That means its a little messy, busy and overall not optimized for mobile searching.

I then realized that I had become so dependent on Google that I never even bothered trying other search engines out in literally years. What I’ve found is that Yahoo! and yes, even Bing, have some nice features that Google lacks. For example, using Bing’s image search doesn’t present you with hundreds of thousands of pages, its just one page that you keep scrolling down. As you scroll more images get loaded up. I don’t know why they didn’t make their text search the same way, as I rather like this idea.

Perhaps Google has been resting on its laurels focusing on many other things than search these days (e.g. Android, Chrome, etc.) and has forgotten that they need to start introducing easier and more efficient ways to do search on their flagship service. I’m sure they’ve improved things on the back-end such as performance, search algorithms, etc. but the interface has been virtually unchanged for ages now and well… its starting to show.