Yahoo Search Suggestions Go Real Time

Search suggestions are a very helpful tool and all major search engines have an implementation. Yahoo is now introducing an interesting twist as its suggestions will be much more relevant to the moment the search is conducted. The suggestions will now be near real-time and the emphasis will be on short term relevancy. It’s an interesting approach and one that may be useful in plenty of cases, but there are times when the freshest information is not necessarily the best or the most relevant one.

“You probably already use Yahoo! Search Assist to conduct your searches quickly, but now you can get even fresher suggestions, which will be especially useful when there are recent top news or events related to your search topic. With the new suggestion algorithm we’ve launched, you will see near real-time suggestions to help you easily find the freshest content,” Linda Wang, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo Search wrote.

“For example, I was wondering which team the Netherlands would be matched with in the World Cup today, so I typed ‘Netherlands vs.’, and the first suggestion is for today’s game. Clicking on the first suggestion, I was able to see game information right in the search result page,” she explained.

Incidentally, in the meantime, the Netherlands won the game. In Yahoo’s example, the usefulness of the feature is obvious. By comparison, Google’s suggestion feature doesn’t list ‘Brazil’ even now, some time after the match. The feature has also been introduced to Yahoo News Search where it will come in very handy.

Yahoo is focusing on real-time with search and is now accessing a plethora of information from a number of sources like Facebook, Buzz, Twitter obviously, and its own properties like Flickr. That said, real-time suggestions aren’t always the best choice. Plenty of searches would be much better served by results that are relevant over a larger period of time so, hopefully, Yahoo will emphasise real-time results only for the searches where it makes sense.