Yahoo Adds Search Suggest To Main Site
Yahoo has brought a search suggest feature, which suggests completed searches as you type, to its search engine. Like Ask.com and unlike Google Suggest (which is a seperate site), Yahoo’s runs on its main search site and on Yahoo.com, making it a mainstream features users are likely to take advantage of.
Yahoo’s suggest feature differs from Google’s in several ways, besides the fact that Yahoo’s is for prime time and Google’s is not. Yahoo doesn’t offer suggestions for queries less than three letters (so does Ask, but Google goes from the first letter). Yahoo lets you click to disable the suggestions if you don’t like them (which Google understandably doesn’t offer, since it isn’t used on the main site), as does Ask. Yahoo doesn’t show the number of search results for each potential search. Yahoo offers five suggestions, compared with Google’s ten and Ask’s ten.
Lets compare the results from all three:
Yahoo’s seems to prefer entertainment terms, which matches its audience in some ways. Google and Ask are more diverse, but Google seems to have more updated terms (like two week famous hot dog eater Joey Chestnut). Google’s UI looked good when Google Suggest was released two and a half years ago, but it is positively dated now.
Certainly, Google could refresh the UI and add Suggest to its search engine, but Google might be too afraid of adding too many bytes to the Google homepage to do it. For now, Yahoo and Ask.com can certainly claim more useful and innovative interfaces. Does Google like developing features that work great, and not using them for 30 months in order to let the competition beat them? Perhaps.
For the record, Ask.com listed my name two letters earlier than Yahoo and one earlier than Google, and way higher on the list. Perhaps that’s because I’ve sort of got my own Smart Answer.
Tony Ruscoe at Blogoscoped found an advanced interface for Yahoo’s suggest feature, complete with some really interested advanced query features. Yahoo removed it, but hopefully they will bring it back in some fashion to allow for some cool searches.
Coverage:
TechCrunch
Marketing Pilgrim
Search Engine Land
Yahoo Search Blog
