My brother was logging in to his yahoo mail when I noted something weird with the yahoo search bar on their main page. Yahoo! Search Assist or whatever it’s called (I found four different references, Search Assistant, Search Help etc.) now brings suggestions to your queries via a drop down Ajax box.
Although Yahoo! claims that they have improved their algorithm, I still have to find some proof to it. I tried it several times looking for filipino blogs but it wasn’t easy. Apparently yahoo’s system still don’t rank blogs as top searches. Even problogger didn’t crop up so well.
I find it’s use for research purposes though. It makes searching easy and no doubt people who love the mouse more than the keyboard will find it an invaluable tool. Accuracy however, is another issue.
Improvements also include the integration of photos from Yahoo-owned Flickr that are tagged with words from the user’s query, inlined videos when they are available (such as movie trailers), and even streaming audio snippets from Yahoo Music when you search for certain bands.
Other than the Search Assist, Yahoo incorporates a more “Google-ish” appearance. Looking at how things have been improving, they may also provide a search history or something similar to it if its not already available.
If you want to learn more about the updates, read it up on yahoo search’s blog.
Tagged with: internet
Filed Under: The Web
