The Other Half of the Search Equation
A search company’s mandate is clear: help people find exactly what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. For well over a decade, search companies have taken the approach of focusing almost all of their efforts on making their engines smarter, with better indexes, better ranking and faster servers.
While these are all hugely important efforts, making the engine smarter is only half of the equation. The other half of the search equation is making the query smarter — and this was our focus in the design and development of Yahoo! Search Assist.
Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive* indicates that consumers are suffering from “Web Search fatigue.” The study revealed that while the vast majority of the population uses a search engine to find information on the Internet, only 15 percent of people find what they’re looking for with their first search. Typically, people need to conduct three to four searches to find the right result.
While search engines can and will continue to improve, we think making queries smarter is also part of the solution. While there are a handful of seasoned users and professional searchers out there who employ Boolean operators, site restrict and other advanced techniques, no one (ourselves included) wants to have to think hard about which search terms to use. Our vision was to build a system that helps users confidently construct more sophisticated and targeted queries without slowing them down.
In this first release, we’ve broken the problem into two parts. Part One provides assistance as you type. This has massively reduced the number of misspelled queries being submitted and saves typing time for slower typists. It can also link you deeper into the results space, saving you a step on those quick in-and-out sessions.
Part Two helps you move your searches forward, backward or sideways so you get the results you actually want more quickly. So if you started with a query for ‘Thom Yorke,’ you might get a forward (refining) suggestion for ‘Eraser,’ his most recent album, or a backward (expanding) suggestion for ‘Radiohead,’ the band he’s a member of. You could also get a sideways (or related) suggestion such as ‘solo albums‘ which, when clicking on the term in the left-hand column of Search Assist, will lead you to other lead singers with solo albums like Gwen Stefani or Eddie Vedder.
Now that you know more about the vision behind Search Assist, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts. And if you’re already a Search Assist enthusiast, check out the tips posted by one of our developers for some handy but “hidden” shortcuts.
Larry Cornett and Tom Chi
Yahoo! Search
Excellent tool! Telling only from my server logs, I can figure out a tiny bit of how huge is a search company’s effort to understand human language and translate it into results. The Search Assistant is more than a search, it is a powerful educational tool.
…because Yahoo knows all Thom Yorke fans could use some Gwen Stefani in their lives?
Just kidding. I’m pleased to see the search interface evolving.
Very useful and nice tools especially for webmasters. Thanks.
Great to see that all of you (Top search engine) are working hard to provide better search results. I think search word suggestion is great tool for everyone, beside known advantages it will offer great way of exploring WWWeb to less tech-savvy people.
Also, I would like to suggest one logical thing to do; for making your search engine more precise is:
# Ability to distinguish commercial or Non-commercial nature of search term!!
Goodday ALL!
Very useful and nice tools especially for webmasters. Thanks.
I just came here from a Tamil Wikipedia. First of all thanks for making search assistant which is working fine working fine for English language quires. I would appreciate if this search suggestions feature available in my mother tongue Tamil as well. I used this to find the Compaq c700 laptop device drivers for windows xp without hassle. I would like see more improvements in future as well such as having an option to change the interface to Tamil and etc.
I often misplell my search, and it’s great that Yahoo and others come back and ask ‘did you really mean …’. However, I don’t like the drop down box with Yahoo as the suggestions it offers is no-where near what I am about the search for.