[sift this] Yahoo, creators of the original cool and useful index for the Web, but can they continue their success as their product line diversifies?

Yes. The company has held its position as the premiere value-added index for the Web and has also successfully launched a slew of city-specific Yahoo sections, My.Yahoo.Com -- a personalized news retrieval page, a kid version of Yahoo, and more. In each effort, Yahoo strives to create a simple, yet extremely intelligent interface which gives the user extraordinary access to unlimited information.

One of the more recent productions from Yahoo is Chat.Yahoo.Com, which joins the crowded ranks of Web-based chat rooms. As talkers go, Yahoo falls into the same category as many of the other chat rooms -- it's free thanks to advertising, there are a slew of rooms to talk in, and even more people talk to.

The winning feature of Yahoo's Chat is its design. It is beautifully integrated into the Web browser thanks to technology licensed from Austin based ichat. Using frames, the browser window is completely covered with the chat application that exists either as a plugin, a Java application, or, for the firewall impaired, an HTML version. It's one of the cleanest examples of "browser as application" that we've seen.

Another recent addition to the Yahoo clan is the addition of Yahoo Image Surfer. Again licensing technology from another company, Interpix Software, Image Surfer provides users the ability to search the Web for image content rather than textual.

The idea is fairly simple: rather than sending a Web spider out to just index the text of a page, why not also index the images on the page, as well? You've always been able to search for the image tag on Alta Vista, but unless you're up to using advanced queries, you're simply looking for the name of the picture which may or may not be related to the image retrieved. Image Surfer does the work for you by associating images with content as well as providing a thumbnail of the image so you don't have to worry about false positives. (Quick example: Searching for the image "Ronald Reagan" on Alta Vista resulted in 3 links - Image Surfer supplied 12)

Image Surfer's only fault is bit rot - a surprising amount of the resulting links ended up going nowhere. An up-to-date index is difficult to maintain thanks to the colossal rate of change on the Web. For any index to be useful, it must reflect the state of "how things are" not "how they used to be."

The Bitsifter Digest is undergoing a facelift during the Holiday Season. The next Digest will be published on January 3rd.

Happy Holidays.