Yahoo’s getting crushed by Google in search right now, but maybe they’re on to
something with the interface they’re testing over at
livesearch.alltheweb.com.
The site offers real-time updates to search results as you type, so searches
become more relevant as you add words to your query. Remove a word if things
become too narrow - all without refreshing the page. Providing immediate feedback to queries as they’re created
has the ability to improve the quality of the search experience since it lowers
the bar on query refinement.
Here is an example search for Minneapolis Pizza. After finishing the word
Minneapolis, I saw one set of results. As I added Pizza, the results changed to
what you see below:
Compare that to running a search on Google, then thinking to yourself, “what if
I added one more word to refine my search?” Will you? It takes time to click
into the search box and add another word, clicking search, then waiting for the
results to display.
Alltheweb also dynamically serves up suggested search refinements, such as
“delivery,” “restaurants,” or “hut.”
The site seems to waste some resources by running queries on overly broad
searches for the first word typed. For example, my search for [Minneapolis
pizza] first ran a query for the word [Minneapolis] which wasn’t really
necessary. Hopefully, this doesn’t effect the click through rates of ads
displayed on broader terms I didn’t intent to search for.
Assuming this gets some traction, I could see Yahoo bumping this up to their
primary search site.
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