While monitoring my list of hundreds of feeds this morning, a post at SEOmoz caught my attention.  In the post, which begins on a humorous note, Rand Fishkin says two things about Yahoo:  1) it's got him in the doghouse and 2) the search algorithm has been much improved:

Further down, in the comments, others seem to agree:

I was glad to see some positive mentions for Yahoo over there.  As a company, Yahoo has seen better days.  The company's purple signature color has no doubt bled into the faces of furious managers on more than one occasion in Sunnyvale recently.  And I could spend all day talking about the bad choices and stupid decisions they've made lately.

But when it comes to search, I think Fishkin hit the nail on the head.  The results you get from Yahoo these days are just as, if not more, relevant than those at Google.  As we've pointed out on several occasions at the Internet Marketing Monitor, Yahoo generally has much better results for searches based on current events.  And with it's huge resources of content that Google will never have, Yahoo's SERPs are sometimes just as informative as the pages they link to.

I think we should continue to keep Yahoo on it's toes and question their management issues.  And the jury is still out on Panama and it's affects.  But it's hard to argue that, strictly as a search engine, Yahoo is behind.  But the best way to see which you prefer is simply to test them.  Do identical searches on Google and Yahoo… and then see which SERP you prefer.  If you, like me, don't care for the massively cluttered Yahoo start page, try the slimmed down version at search.yahoo.com.

Everyone has a different preference.  And as several people mentioned in the comments at SEOmoz, there are factors outside the actual search results that can influence folks to use one over the other (email addresses, news, personalized start pages, etc).  But let's give credit where credit is due.

Yahoo may be second to Google in usage.  But it's search results are first class.