Yahoo Launched New Changes to Search & What It Means to Google
Topics: Google, Internet Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo
Yahoo Search Engine has just launched a series of new changes to its search function. The most notable change to it is the addition of Yahoo! Search Assist.
Quoting from Yahoo:
Most of you have already seen the real-time query suggestions we launched on Yahoo.com in July. Yahoo! Search Assist kicks it up a notch, bringing those suggestions to the search results page, along with related concepts that give users a point-and-click query refinement capability that enables them to explore a subject area they may be unfamiliar with.
Search ‘united nations,’ for example, and the new Search Assist knows that the following concepts are related to your query: general assembly, 1945, league of nations, secretary general, etc. Want to refine your query to explore ‘united nations’ + ‘general assembly’? Just click on the ‘general assembly’ suggestion. You now get a new set of results and new concepts related to ‘united nations general assembly.’ Exploring further is now simply a matter of clicking on new concepts.
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.
Yahoo have been testing Search Assist over the past few months and they have seen significant improvements in user satisfaction from those tests. One metric we found was a 61% increase in successful task completion when users had Search Assist as part of their search experience.
I see these changes as positive for Yahoo and definitely closes the gap in terms of its usability with Google. It seems to me that Yahoo is taking a different route from Google by launching this search assist. What Google is trying to do is to understand searching behavior and come up with the suggestions themselves, where here Yahoo is trying to rely on the user to further refine the search results. This is certainly interesting to see how it pans out as to which model do searchers prefer and see if Google really has the ability to UNDERSTAND completely searching behavior and provide accurate suggestions.
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