Yahoo announced that the Inquisitor Safari Plug-in would now be available for Internet Explorer and Firefox users. Yahoo Inquisitor is similar to its Search Assist or the Google Suggest tool. However, it also provides few related websites to choose from.

Yahoo states on its download page that, “Inquisitor understands you, learning and tailoring your results as you search. You can also add more search engines with customized keyboard shortcuts.”. Downloads are available as beta versions currently for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Further in Yahoo Search blog, the Inquisitor team explain, “We’ve also included a bookmark-based retrieval feature for IE. So, if you are looking for a page you bookmarked a few months ago, say an expense report guide on your local Intranet, you won’t need to fumble around your hundreds of bookmarks and folders to find that page. A simple search in Inquisitor will bring it right up.”

The release of recent tools from Yahoo shows that the past leader has still not lost hopes and has determined to survive. May be even rule again one day..

Firefox

Internet Explorer

The Olympic fever has caught up with search engines too. Yahoo has come up with various shortcuts to provide live information through its search engine.

The new enhancement for Olympics would include country specific and overall medal count updates, athlete performance and records. It is estimated that 10,500 athletes would participate from 205 nations world wide. It would be a tremendous job in updating all the events and happenings live on the internet. There are 302 events scheduled to be conducted for 28 different sports.

Yahoo has also provided tips to find out the latest in Olympics. Once the Olympics starts, a query for ‘US medal count’ would turn up recent medals won, event results and track records.

You can also see a personalized athlete performance update by just adding his or her name along with the word ‘Olympics’. Yahoo! Sports would also feature news casts, interviews, images and feeds to get the best possible view on Olympics. Isn’t this a good feature from Yahoo? Google should be having something in its pocket too. Lets wait till the Olympics starts off.

Search engine optimizers have reported of Yahoo Search index and algorithm update. The last time Yahoo had an algorithm update was on December 3rd 2007.

Some webmasters have reported that their traffic has increased with better rankings and better indexing. However, people who had their rankings high for several months even years are disappointed with their rankings in top 5 positions moved towards 30’s and 40’s.

This as search engine observers believe should be due to an update on the search engine’s algorithm. Lets hope for better rankings.