Yahoo! Search Suggest

This past Wednesday (July 11th, 2007) Kevin Lee announced that Yahoo has added Search Suggest to their main site query box in Yahoo! Search Blog: May I Suggest. Search Suggest, which has actually been available on Yahoo’s toolbar since March, automatically suggests terms in real-time as you type in the search query. Kevin’s examples include searching for Arnold S and receiving related search suggestions that spell out the actor/governor’s last name for you (saving you the trouble of having to spell Schwarzenegger). While it is newsworthy that Yahoo decided to offer search suggest from their home portal page search box and does get them some much-needed media play in the search industry, it also invites questions about how they build the recommendations, why they haven’t also placed the function on their web search page and why the disable feature doesn’t seem to work for all Yahoo searchers who elect to turn the function off. It also invites a comparison between Yahoo Search Suggest and Google Suggest, which has been a Google Labs offering since it was announced on December 10th, 2004, in Kevin Gibb’s posting, I’ve got a suggestion.

About Y! Search Suggest

As explained by Yahoo in the “About Search Suggestions” link located at the bottom of the search query suggestion box:

Search suggestions are relevant keywords that are offered in real-time as you type. You can choose them by scrolling through the list using the arrow keys or your mouse.

As you type your query into Yahoo’s portal search box, it makes suggestions for you. As an example, I typed in the query Baltimore and received these choices:

About Google Suggest

As explained, in more detail, in Google’s Suggest FAQ:

Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.

As you type your query into the Google Suggest search box, it makes suggestions for you. I entered the same example query, Baltimore, and was given these choices:

Which Offers the Best Suggestions?

The two seem fairly comparable, although it’s nice that Google allows me to decide whether I want to use the default search offered on its home page or the Google Suggest search service offered in Labs. Yahoo forces me to choose whether I’d like to use their Search Suggest by default or simply not use it at all. It might have been better to give users a choice by making Search Suggest available as a stand-alone feature at http://sugg.search.yahoo.com which, at present, it is not.

Kudos to Yahoo, however, for even having the guts to make something like Search Suggest a mainstream feature. It makes me wonder why Google didn’t force Google Suggest on the world when it updated to offering Universal Search for mainstream results. Since their goal was to acquaint the average searcher with a wider scope of Google’s offerings, perhaps they should have. But I’m sure glad they didn’t, at least on their main search page. I did however recently notice that the new Firefox browser version 2.0.0.2 has a built in search toolbar which defaults on Google, and in this case, Google Suggest has been put into place. The Yahoo suggest option has also been included with the new search toolbar in Firefox. As of now, I haven’t found a way to turn this feature off.

Personally, I find Firefox’s suggestion drop down box that appears, based on my own previous search history, much more useful for every day tasks. Since I often check several search engines, the fact that Firefox uses the autocomplete-like feature to offer my latest searches in a drop down box makes my life easier. So, for example, if I search for Baltimore on Google I get these options (which are all searches I’ve recently performed at Google and elsewhere.

IF you didn’t realize that it was Firefox offering those autocomplete choices in the drop downs and you don’t like them, you can easily turn them off or empty your recent history. See Deleting Autocomplete Entries for more detail on how to do that.

So it seems as though search engines are coming full circle. After years of gathering data on what the world is searching for, we’re now in a place where the engines are starting to talk back.

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