Now, when performing a search on Yahoo!, suggestions related to the first word that you type in will automatically appear in a drop down box below the search bar. The suggestions appear as you're typing, so this limits the number of words you need to type into a query and may also present similar queries to shorten the time you spend searching. The image below demonstrates this with the search term 'London'.
Many of us are already familiar with 'Search Suggest' as it is featured by both Google and Yahoo! within their respective toolbars on Mozilla Firefox. Transforming this from an additional toolbar feature to being placed at the helm of Yahoo! search, however, is a big change for Yahoo! and indeed a big paradigm shift in the progression of web search. Yahoo! seems to have taken the bull by the horns with this one, a change to the main search function is a bold move and the fact that Yahoo! has made this move before Google is certainly significant.
Yahoo! Search Suggest has been implemented to the Yahoo.com site but no moves have been made to apply the feature to other Yahoo! sites, such as country specific sites or the search.yahoo.com variation. This suggests that the new feature is still a test at this stage and that more may be still to come.
Search Suggest is certainly an unobtrusive feature which lets the user type away without interference should they be confident about their search choice. The feature can also be toggled off if preferred.
Feedback has been positive on its first day and interesting discussions have been arising regarding spelling variations and spelling mistakes by searchers.
Taking Arnold Schwarzenegger as an example: what happens when "Arnold Schw" is typed into the search window? In this case Yahoo! Search Suggest fills in the rest of his last name, which is very helpful to the user. Unfortunately however, being such a complicated name, if a user isn't aware that the name Schwarzenegger begins with an S, and types in "Arnold Chw", Search Suggest will list all the common misspellings of his last name, including "chwarziniger", "chwartziniger" etc. This means that Yahoo! Search Suggest is not 100% fool proof at this stage - but still quite close to it!
