Circa 2003, Yahoo wasn't terrible. By our internal metrics, Yahoo search had better results than Bing before Yahoo started using Bing as their back-end. By th

Circa 2003, Yahoo wasn't terrible. By our internal metrics, Yahoo search had better results than Bing before Yahoo started using Bing as their back-end. By that point, I suspect all of the major search engines were using some form of link-graph based ranking signals, likely modified both for scalability and avoiding the PageRank patent. Maybe I was a bit loose with my definition of "Early Google", but in the 2003-2010 time frame, the major search engines had pretty well figured out the most common 95% to 99% of queries.