The standard link list was topped by Wikipedia, then the Gevalia mail-order company, a repeat of Starbucks and Peet's Coffee & Tea.
On that first page were a few coffee fan sites, such as Coffee Universe and Coffee Geek, but nothing as standard as the National Geographic.
There were four sponsored links in the regular list, plus several others off to the right. Overall, the Yahoo listing tended to feature more commercial sites than Google.
Microsoft has sometimes been accused of copying the designs of other companies, and its home page for Live Search will do nothing to dampen those allegations. A quick glance would make you think you had gone to Google.
But the results were markedly different. There were no hits marked "sponsored" (perhaps indicative of why the company is so interested in Yahoo).
At the top was "Top local listings for coffee near Los Angeles." Clever that it picked up that the search was from a computer in Los Angeles, but not too useful in that the three coffee houses spotlighted were all in West Hollywood, far from the Times' downtown office.
All the actual coffee hits were to commercial establishments, such as Peet's, Caribou and Starbucks (in that order).
Otherwise, there was the nonprofit Community of Faith for Economic Empowerment (check out the initials) in New Orleans and the Coffee Break Arcade gaming site.
The end result of this quick test: With its features and interesting mix of up-front hits, Google proved to be the most diverse and useful.
Yahoo was second best, but it and Microsoft seemed to be not-as-good facsimiles.
Note to Microsoft and Yahoo: If you don't want to end up like the Spartans, there could be difficult times ahead.
david.colker@latimes.com
