14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Search has always been the main rival for Google Search as the Sunnyvale company struggled to make its technology more competitive for the Mountain View giant. Today, Yahoo makes a major step in the battle against Google and releases absolute stunning features for its search engine which are obviously improving our search experience a lot. First of all, you're now able to find exactly what you were looking for by typing a correct search query using the suggestions offered by Yahoo. The feature was first released in July 2007 but this is even more than that.
The new suggestion feature, codename Yahoo Search Assist, displays a menu at the top of the page with several suggestions related to your query. The best thing about it is that the related searches are provided in real time so they are displayed while you type the query. This obviously reduces the time for conducting a search and also improves the quality of the results because the keywords are more relevant for the information you need.
For example, typing 'soviet union' in the search box offers me amazing suggestions: 'who was the first and last president of the soviet union', 'soviet union flag' and 'fall of the soviet union'.
"One thing you'll find when you use our new search experience is that Search Assist "automagically" drops down from the search box on the results page when it senses that you're having difficulty formulating a query. But it only shows up when you need it or ask for it. It then offers real-time suggestions and concepts to explore, just like on Yahoo.com. We did this to avoid a common complaint about assistance technologies offered by other search engines -- the "persistent assistance" that puts suggestions on the page regardless of whether a user wants or needs them," Tim Mayer, Yahoo! Search, wrote about the new feature.
The new feature is quite important for the competition with the Mountain View super giant Google because it has never implemented such a function into its search engine. However, Google tested the suggestions on its Chinese search technology but never implemented it into the main solution, as Yahoo did.