Yahoo takes a page from Google

Yahoo continued its momentum in Internet search last week, unveiling new technology to find news articles and rank a Web page's popularity. In direct competition with Google, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo introduced its own software to navigate online news from more than 7,000 sources, replacing its year-long partner Moreover Technologies. Yahoo now claims it has the most comprehensive news search service on the Web, a marker long posited by Google.

In addition, Yahoo has started testing "Web Rank," an algorithm that measures the popularity of a Web page, from 1 to 10, based on how many other sites link to it. People can view the Web Rank measurement bar by downloading a new version of the Yahoo Companion toolbar, which lets them search Yahoo anywhere from the browser. Yahoo's Web Rank closely mimics Google's PageRank, the No. 1 search company's star algorithm for calculating search results. PageRank appears as a little green bar line in Google's own toolbar.