Live Search in Firefox 2.0
- Posted July 11th, 2006 at 4:44 pm by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Search
As you might remember, we recently launched Live Search on AlltheWeb. Live Search is a new Yahoo! Search technology that helps you find what you want faster, by suggesting search results instantaneously as you type.
Thanks to the extensibility of the just released Firefox 2.0 beta 1, you can now get Live Search suggestions from Yahoo! in the Firefox browser search box (top right corner ? sometimes called the ?Chrome? in industry speak).
As you type, Live Search gives you a drop-down list of suggestions to complete your query. And it?s lightning-fast. It?s like having a built-in mind reader in an environment where time is precious.
In addition to helping you find what you?re looking for faster, Live Search also shows you related search terms you might not have thought of but find useful. For example I typed nih and it shows what NIH stands for: National Institute of Health, but also ?Not Invented Here?. Interesting.
I find these suggestions to be extremely helpful. Live Search returns the queries I have in mind with fewer letters typed, and sometimes teaches me a thing or two.
Live Search is also useful for figuring out spelling mistakes. It can even predict whether I?m in the process of making a spelling error before I?m even done. Try ?wethe? It shows weather (with the correct ?a? between ?w? and ?e? before I type the final ?r? of the word. Live Search also inlcudes Also Try and acronym exansion.
We?ve enjoyed working closely with Mozilla to add functionality to Firefox, including Toolbar and Delicious. We hope Live Search will be useful to you, and hope to bring you other ways to use Live Search in the future.
Live Search in Firefox 2.0 is available here in the US as well as in Japan, with more to come. You can download US versions of Firefox 2.0 for win, osx and linux, as well as win, linux and mac versions for Japan.
Please check it out and leave a comment here to let us know what you think.
Ralph Rabbat
Engineering Manager
Y! Search
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Cool, but Flock already has it and theirs incorporates history and bookmarks too. Much more productive.
Hmm… I really wonder about the flow of money between the Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Yahoo. Since Google originally struck a deal with the foundation to make itself the primary provider (and to add “I’m feeling lucky” searching in the address bar), I would assume Yahoo ‘donated’ a good bit of money for this. It’s a war over dependency, in my opinion.
Nice, but if the search results are weak then what is the point?
Is there any way to disable live search in Firefox? Apparently it works for any FF search module, which is okay, but I’d like to have the option to use it or not!